Jeromy Tarkon, a youth soccer coach in Boise, Idaho, walked out to his car on a Sunday morning this past January and discovered a plastic-wrapped letter sitting on its windshield. “It’s because of liberals like you,” the letter began, “that our state is full of nigers [sic] and wetbacks.”



The anonymous letter writer said one young black player on Tarkon’s club team, Juniors FC, had “made the field unclean when he stepped on it,” and how, if he wasn’t careful, Tarkon himself might one day soon “piss off the wrong parent or families”.



Tarkon, a white military veteran originally from California, could have accepted a personal attack, but racially abusing the eight- and nine-year-old children on his team was more abuse than he was willing to tolerate.



After consulting with his assistant coaches – all of whom come from immigrant backgrounds – Tarkon decided to publish the letter on the team’s Facebook page and go public with the story.



Tarkon’s team, though, had been the victim of racial abuse before. In one incident last year, Juniors FC players were taunted by the parents from an opposing team as they walked out onto the field for a game. “Here come the future convicts,” some parents shouted loud enough for the Juniors FC coaches to hear. “Watch out for your wallets.” In two other separate incidents, Tarkon says that he has heard parents from opposing teams aim the n-word at his players.



Tarkon had previously believed that comments like these weren’t worth reporting to the Idaho Youth Soccer Association (IYSA), the state’s governing body and the only institution with the power to levy punishments. He and his assistants figured that their players could respond with their play on the field and that, if the incident was bad enough, they could work something out with the club of the offending party, a process outlined in the IYSA’s policies.



“Maybe I haven’t been proactive enough and the reason why is I know we don’t want to get people more mad than they already are,” Tarkon told the Guardian.



Tarkon meant that some coaches and parents in Idaho youth soccer resent the success of Juniors FC, in part because the club is run free-of-charge for its players and their families. But he may just as well have been talking about the political mood, not just in Idaho, but across the United States.

Reported incidences of racism in US sports nearly tripled between 2015 and 2016 (from 11 to 31), according to Dr Richard Lapchick of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, and grew by a third between 2016 and 2017 (from 31 to 41). Then there’s the depressing list of abuse that occurs off the field, from LeBron James’s house being daubed with racist graffiti to the high school football players who posed in KKK hoods next to a burning cross. Racial abuse that may have once been a cause for public shame is now aired openly as racists feel more emboldened to share their opinions.



“It seems all of a sudden refugees are a big issue [in America],” said Juniors FC assistant coach Adin Ćatović, a Bosnian refugee. “Living here from 1993 until now, there have been many refugees that have come and gone and settled here and moved to different states. There was not ever ... this big issue that refugees are a problem.”



Kibrom Milash, a parent of a Juniors FC player and an Eritrean refugee from Ethiopia whose well-loved restaurant was destroyed by arson in 2015, has experienced firsthand this shift in attitude. Last July, in a shocking act that made local news, racist vandals scrawled the n-word on the side of Milash’s wife’s car. More recently, Milash’s 10 year-old son Biruk has been the on-field target of racially charged vitriol from opposing parents and coaches.



Juniors FC assistant coach José Loza believes that the rise in racial abuse targeting Idaho’s Latino community comes from a growing sense among some of the state’s white population that whites are dwindling into a minority. (While the state’s Latino population has grown over the past decade, Idaho’s non-Latino white population remains 82.4% of the total).



“Growing up here, it gets to the point where you don’t let those little things get to your head or hurt you,” explained Loza. “But at the same time, the more you think about it, sometimes it does kind of get you a little upset. Like why am I being called [racist names] if I’m also a citizen and part of [this community]? I love this country.”



The experiences of Juniors FC, however, are not unique to Idaho. From California to New Jersey and Michigan to Louisiana, players, parents, and coaches relay similar stories to the Guardian of racial abuse. Frequently, young Latino players are the targets. “Speak English!” and “Go back to Mexico!” are some of the most commonly reported comments.

These comments can have a profound effect on the physical health and well-being of their targets. Study after study has found that racism and racial abuse induce a stress-response in their victims that leads to ill health. A 2011 study published in the American Journal of Public Health even found that the mere anticipation of racism was often enough to trigger a fight-or-flight response in subjects.



The institution capable of punishing the perpetrators of on-field racial abuse in Idaho, the IYSA, has so far done little to immediately address Tarkon’s letter. The IYSA’s president, Craig Warner, admits that the organization hasn’t done enough in the past to stamp out this type of racist behavior. “We could do more than we’re doing now,” Warner conceded in an interview with the Guardian.



One of the main obstacles to justice – and a reason why so few reports of racial abuse have come across Warner’s desk – is an arbitration process that often devolves into a case of “he said-she said.” Without any hard evidence of wrongdoing – for example video or audio of the incident – a racist abuser need only lie in order to escape punishment from the IYSA.



That’s precisely what happened to Steve Lynch, an Asian American victim of racial abuse. During a heated argument at a match last year, an opposing coach mocked the shape of Lynch’s eyes with a racist gesture. Despite multiple witnesses corroborating his account, Lynch watched as his assailant walked way from the IYSA’s Judicial and Ethics Committee without a punishment. It was his word versus someone else’s.



Incidents like this one deter members of Idaho’s youth soccer community from speaking up and taking cases of on-field abuse to the IYSA: racial minorities will often shrug off experiences of racism like the one that Lynch reported.



“You brush it off,” Ćatović said of the kind of racism he’s experienced on the soccer field. “You move on to the next game. You look at [the perpetrators], ‘OK, you’re racist. I’m going to move on.’ For us adults, it’s a little bit easier for us to deal with.”



Warner and the IYSA are currently trying to figure out how to encourage victims to report incidences of racial abuse. They are considering everything from inserting more explicitly anti-racist policies into their rulebooks to enlisting the help of US Youth Soccer, the national governing body, in a nationwide anti-racism campaign. (As of this writing, US Youth Soccer has not responded to repeated requests for comment.)



Regardless of the path it chooses, the IYSA already has the power to change its policies and punish persistent offenders. Warner, to his credit, recognizes the power the IYSA has to change the on-field behavior of parents and coaches.



“We’ve really got to look much, much longer into the future because this [racial abuse] will only get worse over time if you don’t try to stem it or create policies or have somewhere where people can report it,” Warner said.



For now, Tarkon and Juniors FC have taken matters into their own hands. They’ve used their media exposure to elicit support from within the Boise community and have drawn national attention from both fans and pro players.



Yet until members of the Boise soccer community – and coaches, parents, and administrators nationwide – agree to consistently report on-field racial abuse and give voice to the most vulnerable members of their community, little will change.



“This doesn’t just lie on the shoulders of the IYSA,” Tarkon said. “This falls on all of the adults [who] are supposed to be role models; we haven’t done enough to bring attention to this.



“It should only have to happen once before we step up cohesively as a soccer community and say, ‘It doesn’t matter what color uniform it is. It doesn’t matter what team you play for. We’re not going to tolerate this. We’re not OK with this and it needs to stop and we need to put things in place to protect our kids.’”