‘Trophy Kids’ Presents Its Sports-Obsessed Parental Protagonists As Horror Movie Villains

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Trophy Kids

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Trophy Kids, a Peter Berg-produced HBO documentary about over-the-top sports parents that is now available on Netflix, catches its adult subjects at the precipice of realizing maybe their big financial and emotional investment is at risk of not paying off.

Between this tension in the 2013 film and the realization you can Google everyone to see if the parents’ fears are justified, you can arm yourself with the knowledge that turns the horrible behavior in Trophy Kids into an actual horror movie. You can yell at the screen like you might do during a horror movie, except that instead of saying, “Don’t go in the room!” you scream, “Don’t bother putting creatine in his milk!”

Of the three kids in the film now old enough to have reached the dream of a Division I college scholarship, one, Ian Fox, met that goal with an offer from Idaho State, but transferred quickly and is playing junior college basketball. Derek Biale got a Division II basketball scholarship but just got booted from his team. Justus Moore, pressed by his former football-playing dad who screams at his crying son in a scene so painful and intimate you feel you like you should step out of the room, is out of sports completely. Spending what Derek’s dad estimated as “two Lamborghinis” for any of these results is explicitly not what these dads laid out in Trophy Kids.

But the horror isn’t just about athletic success, or lack thereof. You’ll also end up yelling, “Back off before your child hates you!” The scariest part of Trophy Kids is you can’t watch it too smugly, because the road to becoming a psycho sports parent (or a psycho drama parent, or psycho music parent, or psycho mathlete parent, or…) is one easily traveled. All it takes is a deep love of your child and a willingness to do anything to help him or her become a successful adult. That’s pretty much the description of every parent.
“Every parent wants their kid to be a superstar – every parent,” says Andre Avery, one of the parents profiled in the Trophy Kids, and who can argue with him? Where sports becomes a particular attractant for over-the-top parental behavior is that it’s often the first time (for most of the country, which does not fret over getting into elite Manhattan preschools) that your child is measured against his or her peers – right in front of you. It’s also the first time you see that measuring stick wielded in an environment in which you are not the adult in control.

What the four Southern California dads profiled in Trophy Kids have in common is that they believe they can control the environment to the point that it will guarantee their child’s athletic success. (The fifth parent in Trophy Kids is a mom who talks a lot about using prayer and motivation to unlock the God-given talent in her tennis-playing twin boys, now playing varsity high school tennis.)

I don’t care how well-adjusted you are as a parent. Watching your child in sports for the first time swirls up a lot of fear (that your child isn’t going to look so good in front of a crowd), pride (that your child looks awesome!) and a suspicion that we live in a zero-sum world in which winners win and losers disappear (my child has got to be better that those other kids!). So when I watch Andre Avery in Trophy Kids curse out his 8-year-old daughter, Amari, for not hitting her golf shots straight because, damn it, she’ll never get a sponsor that way to make up for all the money paid for a Tiger Woods dream of mine, and when I see that since Trophy Kids. Andre has been pressing with nicknaming Amari “Tigress,” and hustling to get on TV hitting golf shots with LL Cool J, and when I see that Amari has also been in another kids-in-sports documentary, “The Short Game,” a Justin Timberlake-produced documentary about a national youth golf championship, and that despite all of that she still doesn’t have a sponsor – well, there for the grace of God and self-reflection go I.

The best thing you can say for the parents profiled in Trophy Kids is that they love so hard and so much, they don’t know how to back off. Whether the parent’s dream is sports, or an Ivy League school, the risk is that by doing everything for your kids, they never get the chance to figure that out for themselves. “They’re used to relying on us telling them what to do,” says Jamie, matter-of-factly. Watching Trophy Kids, you’ll yell that in horror.

[Stream Trophy Kids on Netflix]

Bob Cook, a father of four and a former coach, writes about youth sports for Forbes.com through his blog called Your Kid’s Not Going Pro. His recommendation for getting your kid a college scholarship is to support what they love and otherwise stay out of the way. Follow him on Twitter: @notgoingpro