Oh boy:

HAMDEN, Conn. - Religious statues grace the entranceway to Sacred Heart Academy, an all-girls, private Catholic high school in central Connecticut, and along the pristine path to the 127-acre hilltop campus, small sanctuaries serve as havens for students and the nuns in residence to pause in quiet reflection. Down a long walkway from the main grounds is the academy’s manicured softball field, set in a bowl surrounded by soaring maple and pine trees, a setting with an almost cathedral-like feel.

It was here, the Hamden police say, that 46-year-old Mark Picard, upset that his daughter, Melanie, had been suspended for missing a softball game to attend a prom, clubbed Coach John Crovo in the back of the head with an aluminum bat on May 17.

“He hit him six times,” said Dick Gagliardi, the Sacred Heart athletic director.

“Something like this leaves you numb, because you realize it can really happen anywhere. And worse, you realize it isn’t an isolated episode.”

For years, there has been a noticeable rise in sideline fights between parents, with the most infamous being the death that occurred when two fathers of hockey players brawled after a pickup game in 2000 in Reading, Mass. But youth sports experts are well aware of the trend toward a new category of confrontations - those between parents and coaches - and they point to one overriding factor as the cause.

With college costs swelling and the competition for admission to the most select institutions escalating, parents have zealously pursued athletic scholarships or the perceived edge that a top athletic résumé can bring. To chase this athletic advantage, parents begin investing in their child’s athletic career early, as young as 5 or 6 years old, with private sports tutors, fees for travel teams and annual summer camps, instructional trips abroad and thousands of dollars in equipment. They also devote considerable time, indeed most weekends, to driving their child to and from games and practices.

“It may sound shocking, but I am shocked, frankly, that these things don’t happen more often,” said Dr. Bruce B. Svare, the director of the National Institute for Sports Reform and a psychologist at the University of Albany in New York. “The emotional and financial investment parents have made in their child’s athletics, coupled with the irrational intensification of youth sports, has sent a lot of parents completely over the edge.”

I’ve had this argument with people. My kids got scholarships - one son for art, the other for being an artist-scholar (he got a total of $240,000 in scholarship offers). Yet when I talk to parents about this possibility, they brush me off. It’s “too hard” to get an academic scholarship unless you’re a genius, they tell me. Their kid has a better shot at getting one for sports.

Well, maybe. I doubt it.

My younger son attended the PA state governor’s school, which is a Department of Education program run in most states. If you’re selected, you get an automatic $10,000 scholarship to state schools - reciprocal in any state with a governor’s school program.

You also get recruited by a lot of good schools.

I wouldn’t have known about this program if I wasn’t a reporter. These awards were announced regularly in the wealthy district I covered as a reporter. When I asked about it at my sons’ school, I was told yes, they did try to get kids to apply (unbeknownest to me, the teacher encouraged my oldest son but he never told me), but since it was a working-class district, most kids couldn’t afford to take the five weeks off from summer jobs to attend.

Anyway, there are other options. You don’t have to turn your kid into a performing monkey to get them into a good school.