I heard coaches asking refs to protect the players just last weekend. Of course they wanted it to trigger a response. The response they wanted was for the ref to start calling the dangerous contact before another kid gets hurt.
“Polly wants a cracker.”??? More than a little insulting. Remember that, as referees, you and I never hear if and when a kid gets injured in one of our games. That parent you mock as being nothing more than a parrot? They are the one who has to talk to the doctor about surgery options after the MRI. You and I don’t.
I had the same experience this weekend. There was progressively dangerous contact that led to an injury needing to be seen.
The bottom line is that promotion and winning games is everything in the system we have set up. Soccer is a game about mistakes and making hard contact is a way of creating those mistakes leading to opportunities (or preventing them). As a result, a lot of coaches (rather than teach build up of play or tactics) rely on physical play to get the win-- it's quicker than teaching proper tactics which might take years you don't have as players cycle through the program and/or which the players can't handle at their present skill level. They hand a tool to kids who because of their development and because they are learning they have no means of reigning in or determining how much contact is appropriate. And the incentives aren't there for the coach to reign them in, because worst case he/she ruins a super aggressive player or best case might cost the team the game in a sport which is marked by victories of 1 point among single digits.
Which means the only person left to enforce safety is the ref, which is the unfortunately reality.