Back when I was still in high school, and then into the summers of my first few years in college, I umpired baseball. I wasn’t that good at the sport, but it’s the one sport I love more than any other. I couldn’t stomach not being able to play after my last game in high school, so I decided to umpire.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The pay was good, the hours were better, the coaches were generally nice, and the players were a blast to be around. Everything about it was great, except for the parents. The parents were the worst — yelling, swearing and generally exhibiting the kind of impassioned, unruly behavior reserved for the Spanish Inquisition.

There was no explaining it. One particular game, I’ll never forget, maybe when I was 17, was a particularly bad game. I was horrible behind the plate, butchering the strike zone and flubbing a few other calls. But when you’ve never received actual training to be an umpire, those sorts of things are going to happen. Hey, it was a league for 13-15-year-olds, and most of the players didn’t care, they were just biding their time until they could go smoke pot in the forest behind the ballpark. The coaches understood, and when there were mistakes with rule interpretations, they were genial to help make the correct call.

But again, the parents sucked. At the end of this particular game, one parent came back with a metal rake to accost me because his son struck on on a high called strike to end the game. He was belligerent, and I’m pretty sure if it weren’t for a few other coaches and parents sticking around after the game, something bad would have happened. Luckily cooler heads prevailed.

I couldn’t help but think of my time as a baseball umpire after seeing this video released by sheriff’s investigators in Sarasota, Florida of a brawl at a youth football game last weekend in which a referee was tackled by a player and then attacked.

By tackled, clearly I mean he got speared in the chest with a WWE-style move.

The sad truth of this video, and of my time umpiring youth baseball, has only rammed home the point that rationality, friendliness and pleasantries get checked at the door. What makes it so terrible is that more often that not, the referees and umpires are volunteers with little actual training. They just love the sport and love volunteering to make the lives of kids better.

But these types of incidents happen more often than you would think. They just don’t get recorded on video and make the news. The Internet Era may help shame them after all.

It’s the one thing I wish parents, coaches and players would keep in mind. Granted, the brawl in Florida seems to involve older kids, so maybe the refs get paid and have had training and deserved it. Just kidding, bad call or not, no referee — professional or amateur — deserves this ridiculous behavior.