“On an average Sunday we host almost 70,000 individuals. Even if 99.5 percent of these people are well behaved, you still have 350 people who either have drank too much or have a lack of respect for others around them and can cause mischief.”
Bob Bedinghaus, Bengals director of business development
After players and fans got booted out of games a few years ago, Jerry Ankenbauer instituted a tough conduct policy that calls for a lifetime ban for repeated bad behavior.
Ankenbauer oversees an area basketball league for second- through sixth-graders.
Americans take their sports seriously, and their passion — or obsessiveness — can spill over the line. Sometimes way over the line. At last week’s Bengals-Steelers playoff game, six fans were arrested for assaults, including three involving young men attacking women.
But bad fan behavior isn’t confined to professional sports. It extends all the way down to high school and youth leagues, where administrators have had to take extreme measures in some cases to protect players and the public.
Six Dayton high schools played in empty basketball gyms last week, the result of a student fight in the stands days earlier.
Some say fan behavior is getting worse, but it’s difficult to quantify. For example, the Ohio High School Athletic Association and others don’t keep databases tracking such incidents. Many local school and sports officials say it just seems to be getting worse because these days violence and rowdiness is caught on camera and quickly posted for the world to see.
“We don’t have an overabundance of incidents, but when you have one of magnitude it affects what everybody thinks about it,” said Jamie Bullens, director of Safety and Security for Dayton Public Schools. “Our expectations are not to have any incidents. Our goal is that everybody can come and bring their kids, grandparents and enjoy themselves.”
JERK hotline
Bad fan behavior — even rising to a criminal level — has been around for decades. After a tense 1968 Beavercreek-Dunbar basketball game, three people were stabbed on the court. During a 1975 NFL playoff game in Minnesota, an angry fan lobbed a whiskey bottle at a referee, gashing his head.
Those events were rare then and they’re rare today, given the huge number of games that are played every week. But sports leagues and organizations are taking active approaches to the problem.
At this weekend’s Flyin’ To The Hoop high school basketball event, founder Eric Horstman said he warns coaches that if their fans misbehave, they probably won’t be invited back.
For nearly 10 years, the Bengals have allowed fans to call or text their “JERK hotline” to report misbehaving fans. Bengals Director of Business Development Bob Bedinghaus said “there is no hesitation to have them ejected from the game.”
Dayton Metro’s Ankenbauer said major incidents in the youth league are down since its policy was enacted, but he still gets calls each weekend. He said slightly more issues occur in the girls league, especially at the younger ages, when games get rough and parents get protective.
One parent has received a lifetime ban from the league that includes teams from Sidney to Lebanon and Eaton to Springfield.
“Essentially you get one shot the first time, depending on the scenario, and you can get up to a five-game suspension,” Ankenbauer said. “The second major incident, you’re kicked out forever. You can never watch, participate or play in any Metro game again. It was a pretty harsh and direct policy, but I think it’s helped.”
Ankenbauer is not alone in getting tough on youth sports. The Kettering Youth Basketball league at the city’s rec center warned this year that it would be quicker to suspend players, coaches and fans for profanity and disrespectful behavior.
Organizers said last week’s opening games went smoother than in past years.
Recent problems
Despite policies intended to crack down on bad behavior, incidents locally and nationwide have been a flash point in recent months. A 20-person scrum in the stands briefly delayed the Jan. 5 Dunbar-Ponitz boys basketball game. Coming on the heels of postgame disturbances a year earlier, it led Dayton Public Schools to play all Jan. 8 games with no fans.
The next night, the Bengals and Steelers played a violent, controversial, penalty-filled game in which fans threw cans and bottles at injured Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger as he rode to the locker room.
Leonard Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, cited studies that show in-game violence, particularly if fans see it as unfair, increases the likelihood of violent acts by spectators.
Glass wrote for WBUR in Boston that “fan violence can be further magnified by strong identification with the team, underlying racial and ethnic tensions, social alienation, alcohol consumption, and predominance of young men in the crowd.”
The six people arrested for assaults at the Bengals game were all men between 19 and 33. Three of them were accused of punching women in the face.
The Miami Valley has had its share of incidents — including major on-court basketball fights at Fairborn in 2012 and Springfield in 2015 — but the issue is far from Dayton-specific. A Cleveland-area high school basketball tournament was cut short in late December after a large fight in the gym parking lot. High school football games in October were stopped mid-game due to brawls in Detroit and Houston, and due to gunfire in Miami.
Even agencies that rarely have major problems work hard to be prepared.
“Our security folks and our event staff watch the crowd and monitor cameras,” said University of Dayton Arena Director Scott DeBolt. “When we have a potential spot for trouble, we can focus on that, whether it’s by the student section, or reports of rowdy fans causing problems or being inebriated.”
Being proactive
Bullens, a retired police officer, said Dayton Public Schools’ security officers use simple, proactive strategies at games. They try to stay very visible, and if tension seems to be building in a group of people, an officer or school administrator will stand or sit in the middle of the group.
“A lot of times, that breaks it up by itself. … But based on the rules in our code of conduct, a student could be kicked out of the game, they could be suspended, there could be police involved,” Bullens said. “If we put 100 (security) people, you’re taking away from the ambiance of game. You don’t want to do that. We gauge each game as far as the competition, the rivalry.”
Horstman said he’s tried hard to market Flyin’ To The Hoop as a first-class event, given the national-level teams and college coaches who attend. He said that atmosphere — plus the $15 ticket price — may keep away people who otherwise might think about causing trouble.
DeBolt said any sports event can have short bursts of fan anger, especially in tight games with controversial officiating. That was the case with the Bengals last week. Plus, they were facing their bitter rival, against a backdrop of playoff failure with their season on the line.
“On an average Sunday we host almost 70,000 individuals,” Bedinghaus said. “Even if 99.5 percent of these people are well behaved, you still have 350 people who either have drank too much or have a lack of respect for others around them and can cause mischief.
“The goal is to minimize problems, adopt policies that help (limiting beer sales for example) and address issues that come up in a fair and aggressive manner.”
Indiana legislation
Referees, umpires and other game officials often take verbal abuse from players and fans, and sometimes things turn physical. A prominent Pennsylvania high school basketball coach was placed on leave this month for knocking down a referee with a chest bump. And a Texas football coach pleaded guilty to assault in December for telling two of his players to tackle a referee in September.
Indiana state senator Ron Alting introduced a bill last week that would increase that state’s penalty for battery against any certified sports official. Guilty parties could face up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine if it becomes law. Indiana’s high school athletic association supports the bill, pointing to the difficulty of hiring good game officials.
Representatives of Ohio Speaker of the House Cliff Rosenberger said they are not aware of any similar legislation in Ohio recently.
In Wisconsin, the state high school association this month tried to clamp down extremely hard, telling fans that traditional cheers like “air ball,” “scoreboard” and “you can’t do that” constituted taunting and should be eliminated. There was immediate push-back from people who felt the agency was going too far to sterilize the game atmosphere.
The Ohio High School Athletic Association doesn’t keep track of all incidents at Ohio games. OHSAA spokesman Tim Stried said the state might consider offering some type of site supervisor training for schools in the future, given the demands of managing ticket problems, rowdy student sections, medical issues and security.
“I don’t think things are getting worse, but the rare incidents that do happen, with the media coverage and social media, they take on a life of their own and become so well known around the state,” Stried said.
The very ingredients that can make sports such a high — talented, competitive people, cheered on by family, with the community highly invested in the result — can lead to bad behavior when a team or fans feel let down.
“At a lot of games, it’s such an intense atmosphere, in close quarters, and we’re dealing with high school kids who have high emotion,” Stried said.
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