"How many well-adjusted adults do you know who were raised by micromanaging parents?," says Dan Doyle (at his Institute for International Sport). (MATTHEW J. LEE/GLOBE STAFF)

By Irene Sege
Globe Staff / May 6, 2008

KINGSTON, R.I. - After many years of playing basketball and coaching college basketball and hosting tournaments for scholar-athletes from around the world and raising six children, Dan Doyle has some advice for parents of young athletes.

"On matters of playing time and strategy, stay out of it," he says. "On matters of ethics, jump in."

Actually, Doyle has considerably more than that to say on the subject. He has just published "The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting," a 446-page first of two volumes that covers everything from no-cut youth leagues to college recruiting. A third volume will address coaches.

Woven with the pointers on travel teams and sports camps and athletic scholarships are nuggets about parenting itself, be it of athletes or artists, and motivational verses Doyle penned with such titles as "Willpower's Reward" and "The Value of Team." To so-called helicopter parents Doyle says: "How many well-adjusted adults do you know who were raised by micromanaging parents?" Invoking Aristotle, he counsels "finding that balance or 'golden mean' between deficiency and excess."

Doyle, at 59 a scant 10 pounds above his weight as cocaptain of the Bates College basketball team in 1972, has the bearing of a lifelong athlete and the idealism of a believer in the power of sport to address everything from child rearing to world peace.

The encyclopedia joins a list of ventures he founded, including the 22-year-old Institute for International Sport, a nonprofit organization located at the University of Rhode Island, which brings 2,000 young athletes from more than 150 countries to URI to compete on multinational teams. President Clinton delivered the keynote address at the 2006 World Scholar-Athlete Games. Former secretary of state Colin Powell is slated to address this summer's US Scholar-Athlete Games.

In 1991, Doyle launched National Sportsmanship Day, and in 2003 he inaugurated the Center for Sports Parenting, which offers online advice from experts and will soon add a parent-to-parent network. A decade ago Doyle opened the graceful, sunlit Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame that houses his operations.

"Some people jog through life. Others run. He sprints," says former University of Connecticut basketball coach Dee Rowe, who met Doyle when he was a grade schooler attending Rowe's camp and later hired him as a teenage counselor. "He's a visionary. He's brought together people from every race, creed, and color and ethnic origin in hopes of creating peace and understanding. That's his mission. His forum is sport."

Rick Wolff, author of "Coaching Kids for Dummies," cofounded the Center for Sports Parenting. "Dan is sort of a visionary when it comes to sports and sports parenting," Wolff says. "People are surprised these days by how many issues are involved in sports parenting. It's not as simple as it was a generation or two ago."

TRAIN THE MIND

Doyle traces his interest in sports parenting to challenges to sportsmanship observed over a lifetime.

"When I was a kid, it was very common to see fighting in games. It was very uncommon to hear trash talking," he says. That flip-flopped in the 1970s, when colleges and officials began instituting stricter penalties for fisticuffs after the widely publicized brawl at a 1972 Minnesota-Ohio State basketball game. Over time, other problems surfaced, too.

"Trash talk continued, but it was displaced by very bad fan behavior, particularly very bad parent behavior," Doyle says. "Because of their intrusive behavior, parents were robbing kids of the journey to self-reliance." The neighborhood basketball court of his youth, he adds, "was a place of social justice where you would negotiate and compromise. That was taken away by micromanaging parents."

The antidote, according to Doyle, comes in a consistent approach to parenting backed by information. "Most questions," he contends, "could be handled if the parents had a philosophy." What he advocates is simple: aspiration anchored by character development and training the mind.

"In sports, acclaim often precedes maturity," Doyle writes, "and this is why if your child decides to pursue excellence in an extracurricular activity, it is important for you to monitor your child's development of the two anchor traits."

To the parent convinced that a coach is unfairly denying his daughter playing time, Doyle goes beyond his "stay out of it" advice. If the child is also upset, Doyle advises, encourage her to speak to the coach and, instead of complaining, ask what she can do to improve enough to earn more game time. He counsels against allowing young athletes to compete on two teams in a single season. Had talk-show host and Little League coach Larry King followed Doyle's advice, he would have taken a walk instead of, as the New York Observer reported last month, confronting the umpire and making a scene at his son's game.

"I never once talked to one of my children's coaches. Not that I wasn't tempted. It was good for my kids to deal with their coaches. I said, 'I'll be there for you to give advice,' " Doyle says. "I knew there was a lot of value to the disappointing aspect of sport. I did not want my children to go undefeated in their sports careers. I wanted them to have a wide span of experience."

If a coach behaves unethically, whether by gossiping about players or displaying poor sportsmanship or condoning the use of performance-enhancing drugs, parents, Doyle says, must intervene. "It is your obligation to do so," he writes. "At any level, you may feel more comfortable going over the coach's head."

ACT OF FORGIVENESS

Doyle served as assistant men's basketball coach at Brown University from 1976 to 1978, then as head basketball coach at Trinity College from 1978 to 1981. He gave up coaching because his oldest child, Danny, now 36, is severely autistic and, at the time, Doyle and his wife needed to find an appropriate program for him.

Contemplating his next step, Doyle recalled trips to Europe and Cuba he had taken as a player or coach. He earned a master's degree from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and founded the Institute for International Sport.

In 2005, when Doyle was finishing the chapter on his philosophy of sports parenting, four teenagers, in a random act of violence, beat Doyle's son Matt unconscious as he left a gym in Chicago. Matt Doyle, now 34, was hospitalized for almost three months and still suffers from seizures. At the youths' sentencing, the Doyles, in an act of forgiveness, challenged the attackers to change their lives. They also learned that several, including one who expressed an interest in playing college football, had been involved in sports.

"Had one strong, firm and fair coach entered the lives of these four boys," Doyle writes, "and spread the unambiguous message of fair play, self-restraint, respect for others and commitment to non-violence, they might have spared Matt, our family and society from their act of savagery."