A twelve-year-old shows up to practice three weeks after her father’s funeral. She wants to be there. Her coach, a volunteer with a clipboard and no training for this, has to decide what to say.
Most coaches say nothing. Emilio Parga has spent his career trying to change that.
Parga is the founder and executive director of The Solace Tree, a Reno-based nonprofit that has supported grieving children, teens and families for more than two decades. He holds a master’s degree in education and works as a sports and performance thanatologist, a specialist in how death and loss affect performers, from elementary school athletes to professionals.
The scale of the problem is bigger than most sports parents realize. About one in eleven American children will experience the death of a parent or sibling before age 18, according to the national Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model. More than 6.6 million kids. Every youth league in the country has them on its rosters right now.
Sports can be the best or worst place for those kids. The best, because a team offers routine, belonging and adults who show up consistently. The worst, because sports culture teaches emotional control, and a grieving child can read that as an instruction to hide.
Parga says the signs rarely look like sadness. Grief in young athletes shows up as fatigue, slipping concentration, irritability, flat performances and sudden frustration. Coaches often read those as attitude problems. Teammates read them as weakness. The kid reads the silence around them as proof they should keep quiet.
The fix does not require anyone to become a therapist. It requires what Parga calls grief literacy, the ability to recognize loss and respond simply and honestly. He teaches adults a handful of phrases that do more than any speech.
“This is hard. This matters. You are not alone,” he says.
Those three sentences, said plainly by a coach, tell a grieving athlete the two things they most need to know. The adult sees them, and they are still welcome exactly as they are.
Parga is now building the infrastructure to make that training standard. He is developing a youth sports camp centered on mental health, a training program for coaches and a parent education program in grief literacy. The aim is for every adult surrounding a youth team to know what to do in the week after a player’s loss, not just the ones with counseling backgrounds.
The Solace Tree’s work already runs from K-12 schools and universities to collegiate and professional teams, and Parga has discussed unprocessed grief in high school athletics on podcasts for coaches and athletic directors. The lessons translate across every level. The higher the level, the stronger the pressure to perform through loss, and the more a culture of silence costs.
For parents, Parga’s advice starts at home. Do not hide your own grief from your kids. Children learn how to grieve by watching adults do it. A parent who cries, talks about the person who died and keeps their memory present gives a child permission to do the same.
For leagues and clubs, the ask is smaller than a program. Put grief on the agenda once. Train the coaches once a season. Decide, before anything happens, how the team responds when a player loses someone, because on a long enough timeline every team will.
Youth sports has spent the past decade learning to take concussions, hydration and mental health seriously. Parga is arguing the next item is already overdue, because it touches more kids than any injury. Grief is not rare. It is everywhere, wearing a uniform, hoping somebody notices.
