PARENTS.  In sporting terms, who’d have ’em?

Dale Garland would. We clearly heard that as he paid generous thanks to a whole range of people at his induction as a Sporting Hero at Beau Sejour this week, including his ‘Royal Bank of Dad’, and I’m sure so would the likes of Dan Arblaster, Heather Watson and Kristina Neves, all of whom picked up awards at sport’s annual celebration night.

Supportive parents are hugely important in the development of young sports stars, just as they are with their education, but the Football Association in England seem to regard them rather more warily, to be suffered even.

Last weekend we saw the local launch of the Respect campaign in junior football, on the face of it a worthy enough exercise to curb excessive involvement of parents, but when you analyse it a little more deeply, it’s probably not much more than a cosmetic exercise to show how the national game would like to get to grips with bad behaviour within and around football but seems to ignore the proper culprits: the professional game and players such as Wayne Rooney who in front of millions of TV viewers around the world last Sunday, consistently swore at referee Howard Webb and scandalously got away with it.

The professionals, be they managers or players, have shown precious little respect for the campaign so far this season and I would argue until such time they do then the benefits of such schemes pushed out nationally by the Football Foundation won’t be maximised.

Fair enough, the GFA are only doing their bit to promote a better image for the game, but thanks to Mr Rooney and co it is working with one hand tied behind its back.

But back to sporting parents. It really is a vital role which perhaps we all, I’m still one too, should think about more deeply, more often because I can come up with a long list of talented young sports stars who were put off by a pushy parent(s) and simply gave it all up for a quiet life in the pub.

It’s a tricky business showing the right level of support and regularly I shake my head at the blinkered extent to which some parents will go to ensure their child gets an advantage or is seen in a better light than a rival competitor.

Dale, undoubtedly, got the best support from the moment his running-mad dad, Graham, who introduced his boys to the joy of running by getting them to keep him company on some cliff runs.

Of course mum, Pauline, a national-level netballer, also played a key part and their sound parenting ensured against their son becoming too big for his boots, which is so easily the end result of over-zealous backing of the prodigy.

If there was one award which pulled at the heart-strings on Wednesday evening it was the development one which went to badminton’s Pauline Leadbeater.

What a wonderful lady this is, with more than half-a-century of coaching youngsters and producing not only outstanding talent but teaching the less-skilled the joys of the game.

If ever a local coach is deserving of an honour from the palace or No. 10, it is this one.

STEVE CRAM might have wished he had not bothered to get in an early morning run with Lee Merrien before heading back to the UK.

Not only did the less than sharp modern-day Jarrow Arrow have to contend with waves spilling over the seawall on the front, but the odd cheeky remark from passing motorists slowed in the morning jams, but also a pulled hamstring.

Having heard one wag shout from his vehicle: ‘You can have him Lee,’ Cram was apparently still a mile away from their destination when the former world champion and record-holder pulled up with a tight hamstring.

Merrien walked him back to his own home before taking the injured runner back to his hotel by car.