"This team is a joke."
"They could have Patrick Roy in net, it
wouldn't matter."
"Is the coach the guy with the greasy
hair, cheesy mustache and dirty ball cap?"
That's not the worst of it. Not even close.
The comments are directed
at minor hockey teams across Ontario on an internet forum called Network 54,
where users trash minor hockey parents, coaches, administrators, and even the
kids playing the game -- all anonymously.
"I find it embarrassing," says Brad
Wiseman, coach of the Minor Peewee Mississauga Terriers, whose team has been
subject to comments in the past.
"It's shocking and disappointing, really,
in the sense that it provides a vehicle for parents or adults to go on and talk
badly about other adults or, even worse, other people's kids."
Complaints about ice time, parents ripping on other teams, comments about weak goaltending, opinions on which kids should have been cut from the team, criticism about the volunteer coaches -- these are all hot topics on Forum 54.
Popularity a concern
Postings begin with a topic about a specific
team and then other users add to it, with comments sometimes numbering in the
100s, and often only minutes apart.
The popularity of the site causes much of the
concern.
Wiseman, who has been coaching 10 years, now
starts the season warning parents to stay away from Forum 54.
"By reading the information on there,
you're more likely to want to respond, so why even read it to begin with?"
he says. "So I say, don't go on it. I stay away from it and I don't read
it.
"If it's about you, it's hard not to take
it personally," he adds.
Forum 54 has come up at league meetings in the
past, with discussion surrounding what can be done to stop the trash talking.
"How can this just not be removed?"
Wiseman asks. "It does no good for anyone."
But the answer, as he knows, is you can't
really stop it.
Difficulty policing
The biggest problem with the site is the
anonymity that makes policing difficult, if not impossible, says Scott Oakman,
executive director of the Greater Toronto Hockey League.
"The only thing we can do is advise
people of their ability to file complaints with Network 54 and have postings
that are deemed inappropriate pulled down," he says. "The site is
based out of California, so in terms of our ability to prevent it, I don't
think it's feasible to do."
Last year, when players from two opposing
teams were trash talking on the social networking website Facebook, the GTHL
identified the players and intervened.
"It's obviously more difficult with
Network 54," Oakman says.
One incident he knows of is now before the
courts, though. A family that was subject to destructive postings filed a civil
suit after the writer's IP address was revealed, and the person's identity
exposed.
That, of course, is the extreme. The ideal
solution is to convince minor hockey fans and parents to use the site in a
productive fashion by posting information such as scores from weekend games, as
some users do.
The trouble is, most people are using Forum 54
to make destructive comments.
"This
site is the most infamous one out there," Oakman says. "It's infamous
because people can say what they want on there without any level of
accountability. Quite frankly, it's cowardice to post the things people post on
there.
"Young players' names have been posted on there. They're just examples of people who have no courage, when they're picking on or bullying young kids."
