Seth Joyner Responds To Youth Football Video, Defends His Intense Coaching Style
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) --- A video showing former Pro Bowl Eagles linebacker, Seth Joyner, angrily yelling and cursing at his youth football team surfaced last week. Joyner, who joins the 94WIP Mike & Ike Show every week, responded for the first time on Tuesday.
"That's the problem with kids nowadays, is that there's no sense of urgency," Joyner told Michael Barkann and Ike Reese on the 94WIP Mike & Ike Show. "That's the difficulty that you face when you are coaching young kids nowadays. We've toned everything down for our kids and we've done everything for them. They have no fight, they have no competitive spirit, no drive, but then I'm supposed to take them and make them these world class athletes? It's tough because they don't get it at home. So when they don't get it at home, I mean, I'm supposed to be a miracle worker for two hours three times a week and then two hours on Saturday? So it's tough. It's a tough situation, but you know, that is what these kids need."
Listen: Seth Joyner on the 94WIP Mike & Ike Show
In the video addressing his youth football team, the ex-NFL star said, "If you don't want to play football tell me now and I'll tell them we'll forfeit the f----in game and we'll just leave right now. Tell me! Tell me, because that's not football! You walkin' around and they're running. If you don't want to play tell me, so I could stop wasting my time and yours!"
Joyner explained that the man who video tapped his pep talk and sent it to TMZ was the only person who has a problem with his intense coaching style.
"Well listen, you know what the problem is when you coach youth football," Joyner said on Tuesday. "People want the benefit of having, you know, someone like me coach their team, but they want it done under their terms. And realistically it really was a situation where I had a parent---one parent out of 25 parents---who had a kid on my team, he was a coach on my team, and two weeks previous to this whole thing I had to remove him from my team. He was just a cancer. So then he made it his personal vendetta to bad mouth me and try to make look bad. But hey, I'm OK with it. I got thick skin, you know. My boys, my other 24 boys, love me to death. My coaches and my parents love me to death. So that's all that really matters. I realize who and what TMZ is and I know what he was trying to do, but you want to know something, all he did was galvanize my football team and on the flip side of it he wound up getting kicked out of the league, wound up getting his kid kicked out of the league permanently, and it's just a sad situation because the only person that got hurt in all of this is his own kid."
Joyner admits his style isn't for everyone, but has always been up front about it.
"And to be honest with you my coaching style ain't for everybody," Joyner continued. "You know, so if you're one of those parents that are going to be thin-skinned---and listen I put together a coaches-players-parent contract at the beginning of the year spelling out exactly what I was going to be doing, how I was going to do it, what the parameters were. You couldn't be on my team if you didn't agree to those things that were on the contract. Obviously he breached that contract, not only as a parent, but as a coach. And my style doesn't fit him. So, my team isn't the team for his son to be on because I'm going to make him competitive and I'm going to make them better football players. And I understand and know what's necessary to get that done. Now, I could have done without the F-bomb, but you want know something, at the end of the day I'm still passionate about the game. I don't care whether you are talkin' about youth football, professional football, I'm still passionate about the game. And if my tactics and my message aren't what's good for you, then you need to find another team to put your kid on."
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