But now that I mostly stay home with my kids I have come across something that intimidates me: soccer parents.

After I resigned my newspaper job, I was eager to take on volunteer work and soccer coaching seemed perfect, especially since I had been a soccer player for five years.

I had faced all kinds of unseemly characters during my career as an investigative journalist, I figured that teaching six-year-olds to play soccer would be easy. And it many ways it has been. Soccer is natural for little kids. They don't have to stand in lines and wait their turn like they do for T-ball. They get to run around a lot and the rules are fairly simple.

But the parents! Not all the parents, of course. Not even most of the parents. But it seems as though every team has one or two screamers who diminish everybody's enjoyment.

During practices, these parents watch their children very carefully and are quick to point out whenever they were doing an activity incorrectly. This is completely unnecessary. The children are not trying to kick the ball crookedly. They are young and these things take practice. At games, they scream at their children. "Kick the ball!" "Pass!" "Run!" All this screaming takes away from the children's enjoyment of the game. Sometimes the advice is not even correct. A defensive player, for example, often needs to wait and see what move the forward is going to make, but that's hard to do when there is a parent screaming "RUN TO THE BALL!" from the sidelines.

But I'm ashamed to say that all the assertiveness I learned in the newspaper world seems to leave me when I need to tell a parent to be quiet.

So at the beginning of the last season I wrote all the parents a letter. I explained to them that the league frowns on screaming parents and that it distracts the children.

I thought: They'll read that and they'll be embarrassed and they'll sit there quietly all season.

But it didn't work.

I even had one mother scream at her daughter for laughing during the practice. I felt like stopping right then and telling her that her daughter's laughter shows that she is having a good time. And that the idea is to PLAY and HAVE FUN.

But I didn't.

I think I'm reluctant to criticize the parents in front of their children. I don't want to undermine their authority as parents. But I'm also just plain intimidated and I don't really know why. As I think about it I remember that I was terrified to even dial the telephone when I was assigned my first newspaper story almost two decades ago. It took years of practice to become a hard-nosed newspaper reporter. And that's what it's going to take to become an assertive soccer coach: time. But please, meanwhile, try to be considerate. Let your kids play. Let them enjoy learning a new skill. Let them hear the coach. Parents should also try playing soccer with their kids and try some of the drills they see in practice. I think they might not be so quick to criticize if they only realized that it's not as easy as it looks to control a bouncy ball.

And finally, remember that this is a child's game. It's not the Cowboys v. the Steelers. It's not the Bulls against the Knicks. If you want to go scream your head off at a professional sports game, pick up your local newspaper and find out how to get tickets.

And be sure to check out the investigative reporting while you're at it.

Rebecca Thatcher is a soccer player, coach, and the mother of two soccer players in Akron, Penn.