The Renegade Lawyer Podcast

Ep. 204 – The On-Fire Brain and the Future of Youth Sports

• Ben Glass

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A Special Episode on Refereeing, Emotional Regulation, and Showing Up as the Sane Adult in the Room

In this special edition of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, Ben Glass steps away from case law and legal marketing—and dives into one of his biggest passions: youth soccer refereeing.

Now in his 52nd year wearing the whistle, Ben shares a presentation he recently gave to high school soccer referees in Northern Virginia. But this talk isn’t about yellow cards or offside calls—it’s about brain science, emotional regulation, and why the real job of adults in youth sports is to protect the experience for kids.

Drawing from decades of personal experience as both a referee and a parent of nine (including four children adopted from China), Ben opens up about how raising kids with early trauma taught him how to better handle on-fire brains—on the sidelines, the field, and at home.

🧠 Highlights:

  • Why descent is a cancer on the game—and what referees can do about it
  • What happens to the brain in moments of emotional escalation
  • How lessons from parenting trauma-impacted kids can transform your leadership on the field
  • Why every youth sports adult needs to adopt the mindset of "the sane adult in the room."
“You don’t calm an on-fire brain with logic or threats. You calm it by being heard.” — Ben Glass

📚 Bonus: Want to learn more about Ben’s adoption journey and how it reshaped his understanding of emotional regulation?

👉 https://youtu.be/ibJHocmHH-g?si=G5kGM3x8GTGyS9ud

This one’s for:

  • Referees in any sport
  • Parents of youth athletes
  • Coaches and volunteers
  • Teachers, mentors, and anyone in emotionally high-stakes environments

🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com

What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?

In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.

One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.

There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.




SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show that challenges the way lawyers and professionals think about life, business, and success. Hosted by Ben Glass, attorney, entrepreneur, coach, and father of nine, this show is about more than just practicing. For over 40 years, Ben has built a law that stands for something bigger. He's helped thousands of lawyers create practices that make good money. Do meaningful work that'll make it. Each week, Beth brings you real conversations with gets to our challenging the status quo. Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and builders. These are people creating bold careers and meaningful lives without burning out or selling out. If you're ready to stop playing small and start thinking like a renegade, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_01:

Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass, and welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. This is actually a very special edition of the podcast. As most of our listeners know, uh my big passion outside of my family and running the business is refereeing youth in high school soccer games. I'm actually starting my 52nd year of refereeing here in 2026. 52 years of refereeing, which means I've actually refereed longer than most of the parents yelling at me have been alive. And recently I gave a presentation uh to the uh Northern Virginia High School Soccer Referees Group, and it was on how to deal with the on-fire brain. Now, before you click off and go on to the next episode, you might want to listen to this even if you're not um a soccer referee. So certainly if you're a parent of a kiddo who's playing in youth sports, this will be interesting to you. Um, but if you deal with human beings at all, uh I think this will be interesting. This is uh based upon um some of what we learned about brain science from raising our children. Uh it's based upon obviously 52 years' experience. And I talk about how to prevent these major escalations that we oftentimes see actually in our social media feeds of parents and referees and umpires and players just going crazy. So the talk was about 30 minutes. I did uh uh my national security folks and my um United States military folks will recognize that I misuse the term or the ratings for DEF CON. I talk about DEF CON 5 when I really should have meant DEF CON 1 during the talk. So note that uh I have been uh I've been corrected on that. Um but I hope you enjoy this. If you have a soccer referee friend, if you know of a soccer referee group or youth sports group, uh go ahead and share this podcast with them. I think it's important that the sane adults in the game continue to work very hard and have courage and integrity to protect the game of youth sports. For me, it's soccer, but for you it might be baseball or football or volleyball, uh, basketball, any of these sports. So uh I hope you enjoy this. Let me know and please spread the word about how we can all get better in managing youth sports to make for a great experience for the children. Okay, let me share with you some ideas about dealing with what I call the on-fire brain. This is based upon my experience, 52 years of refereeing. Doesn't mean I'm 52 years old, 52 years of refereeing. Now, what 52 years guarantees is that you're a lot slower now than you were when you were 16 and your body needs a lot more days to recover. But it also gives me a great line. I don't use it so much in high school, but I do use it on the weekends with parents and coaches. I was doing a like a U-10 girls game, and some mom's giving me a stick. Call it both ways. I've blown the whistle once. And I said, I said, look, I didn't just show up yesterday and like start refereeing. In fact, I've been refereeing longer than you've been alive. And that usually gets them quiet. Um, another thing that uh you may not know about me is that we've got uh Sandy and I, my wife, we have nine children, five biological, four adopted from China. Two of those children had very hard early lives, rewired their brains, early childhood trauma. And one of them is she's doing really great now, but for years we struggled with something called emotional regulatory disorder, the on-fire brain. And with this daughter, we could go from having a conversation about something and maybe having a minor disagreement to an escalation to sort of a major event sometimes. It was really, really hard. And that could happen in a heartbeat. And we didn't know anything about how to deal with that. And we would try logic and reason and say to her, You are she was uh 11 when she was adopted, she lived in an orphanage tonight, you are safe here. We love you, you are going to be fed, you are going to be protected. But that but as that brain was escalating, she could not hear that, she could not process that. So then we did the thing that most parents do. We go, let's go to discipline and consequences. If you continue to act this way, there's going to be a punishment. Literally pouring gasoline on a fire. And so we started to, we thought, well, we need to know, like we need to learn so we can be better parents. We started to travel around the country and go to conferences where this subject was being taught. We talked to experts, and we learned all about brain science and about the amygdala and about the flight or fright response and how we as parents, the key was we as parents had to learn how to respond to this brain that was escalating in a better way. It wasn't on the child. And as we went through all that training, and again, this child is doing really, really well now, and even she can look back and go, you know, I was a real handful. It dawned on me that it is very similar to what to what we deal with on a soccer field in an emotional game, and particularly in the high school. So, first let me say, and you can go to the next slide, Tommy, is for those of you who are new to high school soccer, like, yes, thanks for being here. Like, my opinion now, based on many years of doing this, is a high school athlete is this is a superior being. Like the the boys and girls who play are by and large awesome. The coaches are by and large awesome. The parents we don't really hear too much because they're up in the stands. But by and large, the folks that you will commute that you will deal with, for all of you who are new to the game out in these high school games are good people. And if we go into games with that attitude, rather than oh, this is a high school game, it's a bribery game, it's gonna be a shit show. Like, we will find a good game. If we go into the game looking for trouble, we will find trouble. So, some quick stats from NFHS and Breferee Magazine. In COVID, it was horrible. We lost 50,000 officials across all sports in high school during the COVID years. We have built that back. And this organization, largely due to the work of John Loney and others on the board who went out recruited, and one of the weekend games who would say, Hey, you look like you're pretty good, referee. If you ever thought about refereeing high school soccer, let me tell you a little bit about it. Let me tell you about CSOA. We recruited a whole bunch of referees, so that's good. Surveys, national surveys, 70% of us think that sportship has gotten worse. And that means that 70% of new officials quit in three years, and that's not good. It's not good for the game, whether it's high school or youth game. You go to the next slide, Tommy. But it's not good because we want this to be fun for you. Because if it is not fun for you, you're not gonna stay in it. It gets to be too hard to do these games if we're not having a fun experience, a reasonably good experience, a great experience out there on the field. And we've heard this over and over again this morning. This is the scholar, the uh sportsmanship part is so important. But what I want to talk to you about here a bit is that it's like our job to be alert, first of all, for that on for the development of that on-fire brain. Because what we learned with our daughter was the earlier we could recognize what was happening, and the earlier that we could calm that brain by letting the brain know we are here, you are being heard. I don't have to agree with you, but I understand that what you feel your experience is stressful, what you're experiencing is stressful, the more often we can prevent that brain from going to ballistic DEF CON 5, right? The longer it would take to get to ballistic. And oftentimes, as Sandy and I got better at recognizing and listening to and calming that brain by letting know it was heard, the more successful we became as parents. And we want those athletes to focus on the experience, but we need to be the same adults in the game. And we can no longer be the ones that go, I'm tough, I can take it, I've been refereing a long time, it doesn't bother me because that doesn't serve the game. And certainly for National Federation of High Schools, for Junior High School League, there's one standard. And in the past we've had some speakers from VHSL come and speak to us, and the standard is excellence. And so for you, for the referees that come next week, for the players and the coaches and the spectators who are there, there's a there's uh an expectation of excellence in terms of sports shit. Tommy, you can go to the next slide. Um, this was interesting. Uh, you know, it is a really good thing to take that rule book that we sent you and actually read it, not just when you're taking the test and start at page one when it talks about the National Federation points of emphasis, because there is, as Kevin pointed out earlier, is a section for referees. And we're expected to be courageous, to have character be consistent, right? That is that is like we are not just there officiating a game, we are protecting the game. And by the way, as we just I said to Tommy, we were talking about that goal kick run. Like, Tommy, I've been refereeing a long time in high school. Like, I never heard of that rule before. I had no friggin' idea. That thing was a rule. I don't want to be the first one to actually test that on a coach and go, well, it's an indirect free kick against you now. Anyway, all right, Tommy, next. All right, so here's here's the mistakes that we make. We train a lot on foul recognition. We watch the videos, we train a lot on is it offside or not? Is it a deliberate play by the defender or not? And we get good as we go through the referee experience in our careers. We get better and better at recognizing fouls. But we don't train on this recognizing dissent when it happens and then dealing with it, right? And I think that's because that's the hard part. See, it's one thing to go blue ball free kick. It's another thing to have a semi confrontation with a brain that now is getting on fire, and to say, I hear you, but my job as a referee is to make sure that before your brain escalates way up to DEF CON 5, that you know that I've heard and I'm paying attention, and I'm gonna do everything I can as a referee to help your brain coach or player calm down and stay within a reasonable level. So we need to get better as referees in recognizing that dissent is a cancer on the game. And it is our opportunity to prevent that cancer from spreading. And then we need to get good at dealing with it. Because that's the hard part, right? Because uh now he stepped over the line, he or she stepped over the line. I gotta go have a word. The whole stadium is watching you as you walk over to have a word. And that brain is already starting to be a little bit on fire. But if you if you intervene early, you can talk to that brain while it's still in sort of a rational mode. And the more that brain knows that there's a human being on the other side of that whistle who recognizes that, yeah, there's pressures on those high school coaches, right? They don't want to lose games. They got parents emailing them about Johnny didn't get enough playing time, right? Uh they have they're playing a rival game. The more that brain understands that there's a human being behind the whistle who understands the pressures they're on, the greater likelihood we're gonna have of stopping that brain from escalating to the top. Mistake number three is going straight to power. So there was a referee a few years ago, and CSOA is no longer part of the organization. But if you're refereed with this referee, anytime that there was a coach alert going on the sideline, this referee had one technique. You shut up, that was a handball, and if I hear your mouth again, I got a yellow card in my pocket. Think about now that escalating on-fire brain who's looking to be heard and understood at least, now being told to shut up. It's the same technique that we use with our daughter when we didn't know how to handle this. The on-fire brain never, I would say never responds well to power and authority. And we have other tools in our toolbox. Thanks, Jeff. Not even Tommy, it's James. All right, so little slide of things that Sandy and I learned about the anger cascade. We can have a rational discussion. You and I can go out. We've had some debates here about rules and interpretation and what should we do in this situation and that situation. And nobody's pissed off at each other, right? You may feel if you're not getting an answer that you want, or if it's confusing, you may start to feel your heart rate elevating. You may, you're if I watch you closely, your eyes might start to dilate. You might even get pissed off, right? That's early, early stage. And what happens is, and this is to make a long story about the science, this is what protected our ancestors from being eaten by saber-tooth tigers, is that their brain eventually got to danger, danger, danger, escape mode, nothing else matters but getting out of the way of the tiger, right? And that human brain has not changed through millions and millions of years of elevation. And so our job, in my opinion, is to get to that brain, coach or player, in that stage one, stage two place. Because once they get to stage three or stage four, the logic and reason of if you do this again, now I'm going to give you a yellow card or come on, Johnny, I need you to, I need you to get control of your team, right? That brain, just understand this, cannot even process. Cannot even process what you are saying to it. And that's when you feel like, man, I've done everything I can, and this kid is crazy. Well, it's not that the kid is crazy, and it's particularly when they're under 25. I mean, the brains aren't fully developed. So if that kidna, like he or she gets can get there faster, right, than most adults. But if we let it get to stage three and stage four, it doesn't, it almost doesn't matter what we do in terms of trying to de-escalate it, uh, because the it's it's not that they're a bad person. It's that the human brain starts to go into this survival mode. Go on to next one. Uh, and there you go. And so this is what this is what we learned. First of all, that on fire, that potentially on fire brain wants to be know it's no to know that it is heard. How many times have you maybe tried to have a discussion with a coach and he goes like this? Well, how does that make you feel? Well, how many times have we, in response to a coach who's got something to say, I'm not even listening to you. Escalation, I guarantee you, like that's not gonna be the coach, oh okay, we're good. We're good, you're not listening to me at all. Now we don't have to agree. Many times with our daughter, the language that we learned to use was it can be really hard to feel this way, or to feel like we're against you or you're not loved, or whatever it was, whatever her oftentimes irrational feeling was, we at least recognize or learned to recognize these are strategies and techniques. We learn to recognize to acknowledge it can feel really hard to believe that something is is X. Right? And so you don't have to say it in that way to a coach, but as I think Kevin said earlier, it's like it goes a long way to say, I hear you. One of my lines is, I heard you the first three times. You told me that that was offside. And I didn't blow the whistle, and my assistant referee didn't raise her flag. And then I actually had a conversation with a coach in the fall in the youth game. I said, uh, because I went straight to yellow card when five times in one move down the field, five times he yelled so that the people in the other side of the stadium, in a high school stadium, in the upper deck, could hear that he didn't agree with me. Um and I said, I went there because you did it five times. I said, Why why did you do that? He said, Well, I wanted you to change your call. And as soon as the words came out of his mouth, he knew that that wasn't. So we now we're sitting there looking at each other, going, like, really? And I almost went to, um, not perfect, but I've been refereeing longer than you've been alive. Right? And the and the human brain does not like to be told simply that it's wrong, the on-fire brain. No, you're wrong. That was a handball. You're wrong. And so the thing that has worked well for me is I say to players in my pregame and coaches, I'll always tell you what I think I saw. And you know what? Sometimes I'm really surprised. Because another line I use sometimes is send me the video. Send Kevin the video, and Kevin will show me the video. And then we sit there and we go, holy shit. What I thought happened when I was there in the game, in the middle of the game, that game looks a whole lot different than a video. That guy was right. So sometimes they're actually right. So we don't have to win every argument, winning, convincing the coach or the player it was a handball. Because they're not gonna go there. By the way, great strategy with your uh spouse or life partner is you don't have to win every argument because if you did, you'd married a loser, and we didn't marry losers. Okay, next next slide, James. Um, I got this one, I stole this one from John Loney. John and I did a presentation a couple of years ago. GPS framework. At its top, we are protecting the game. We're protecting the integrity of the Virginia High School League, whose standard is only one standard, and that is excellent. We are working with our partners. This came up a little bit today. It's come up in some discussions I've had here today. As good as we all are, we are teamed with people who either aren't very good. That happens, let's be honest, or they come to the game with the wrong attitude. In that game, we are unified. We are a team. I have your back even if I think you're crappy, narcissistic, and arrogant. And I hope you do that if you have me as your part. And the time, the time for sorting that out is in the locker room before the game at halftime, and then certainly have a discussion with your leadership board, with John, Kevin, and say, you know, this happened, and I need to know with this referee, and I need to know how to deal with that. That's really a different subject. But in the game, we are aligned. Don't ever throw your partner, one of your partners under the bus to a coach in the game. Just suck it up, get through the 80 minutes, and figure it out later and have a good discussion later. And of course, so self just means. We want to enjoy life. You have this one life. You have no control over who you're born to, how long uh how long you have to live. And it's meant to be lived in your joy. And we're doing this not for the money, not for the 7% increase or whatever that is, right? Like I did my, I actually did a calculation last year of my time for all of my refereeing, all the training, it's like$16 an hour. And my billable rate in the lawyer field is like a lot higher than that. But we want you to have fun. We want you to be safe. Have fun. Next slide. Thank you. So, a couple things that I found that work for me, you may find it work for you. At the end of the day, everybody has their own personality. Number one is when you do have to talk to someone, you don't have to run over to the side of the field and wheel a yellow card and say, coach, stop it. You can take that slow walk. And what I'm trying to do when I'm making that slow walk is I'm telling my heart to calm down, trying to reduce my breathing. I'm remembering that that coach has pressures. I'm remembering that I'm a human being and I might have screwed that up anyway, right? And it might be the fifth time I've screwed it up in this game anyway, right? And I'm trying to remember that his brain is now being escalated. My job is to intercept that brain while it's early in its escalation phase and try not to let it get out of control. So that you know, and if you watch referee films from sort of the old days, there was a lot of that running card in your face stuff. The standard is high-level excellence in sportsmanship. And we're supposed to be courageous and have character and be consistent. And so when things are starting to boil out of control, particularly in the high school game, you can stop the clock. You don't have to stop the clock always, unless you're gonna issue a card. But you can walk to that conversation. And sometimes we're getting some information if we're wearing cons. Alright, the magic words you talked about this. I hear you. I know that you disagree with me. I get it, but it can only be a one referee here. I said to a coach once, hey, next time that happens, just blow your whistle. Like, he laughed. He laughed, and I had him. I had him back on my team. He goes, Yeah, you're right, you're right. Send me the video. Send me the all the games are videoed. They all got it. What is saying when you say send me the video? I hear I hear you. I'm willing to look. I sat down with a coach uh a couple weeks ago. We watched an entire the regional playoff game. I wasn't involved in it all. We watched the entire game together. It was a shit show. He learned some things, I learned something. So it was a really cool conversation. Um, as a coach once was whining on the silent about something I couldn't really, he's in my comms because the AR was near him. He was actually not mad at me, he was mad about some sportsmanship or something going on. So I did the slow walkov. He's still going on. I don't really understand what he's saying. I mean, I hear the word, I don't understand his beep. I said to him, What do you want me to do? I don't know. I'm just venting. We're good. All right. Doesn't mean I'm gonna do what you asked me to do, right? I want you to call it both ways. Gotcha. Um, so you know, this again, the the thing that we aren't as good at, in my opinion, as we could be, is just recognizing this early and recognize that your opportunity to intervene is early. Now, high stake scam number five. And for those of you who are new to CSOA, there are coaches out here who have reputations, well-earned reputations. Now, John's usually working really hard to put the appropriate teams on referee teams for the games. But when the three of you are preparing for this rivalry high school game with maybe a coach or two coaches that are known quantities, you have to have a lot of discussion. And if I'm the assistant referee in one of those games, I'm finding out from my referee what is your level of tolerance? What do you want me to do if he's coming at me? How much power do you want to give to me or of influence to talk to the coach before things boil over? And you know, we're not like three crew for the whole season. We intermix with different referees, but it's really important to have that conversation and for the center referee to take control of that discussion and lay it out. But by God, do not tell your assistant referees to just take it. That's disrespectful to the team.

unknown:

Right?

SPEAKER_01:

If you're the center referee, it's like, no, you got to let me know. Like if you feel that this is over the line, you feel you need me to come over, you gotta let me know. Here's the other thing, too, is when we are going through a game and making decisions about whether to intervene or not, we're sending signals. So if there's a coach, the coach is on you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and we're not doing anything about it, the signal that sends to the players is this referee sucks. Because I know my coach and I like my coach, and he or she is a good guy or gal, right? This referee sucks. And if we're not intervening, then that belief is growing in the players, and the players feel like, well, he can yell that I can yell. Another reason to intervene early. But the other signal it sends is, as I said in the beginning, most of these coaches are good people. They're out there to do their sporting thing and help these kids grow and develop. And when I'm letting this coach over here get out of control and I'm not showing that I recognize it, this coach over here, who's been to all the clinics where we talked about sportsmanship and excellence, he's saying, so that was all bullshit. What all you guys at CSOA told me about like descent and sportsmanship, and the referee is not taking care of the job with this guy, and I'm I'm a good, I'm a respectful coach over here. That's BS. And that too is a bad signal to send. We don't want to do that as an organization. And another reason to intervene, go on, Tommy. Okay, next one then. Why this matters, of course, we want to provide a CSOA, we want to provide a great consistent um experience for you. We want you to come back next year and fill this room with more quality referees because we want to, in every single game that's played, be able to put out the very best three-man crew, if it's a varsity game, free referee crew that we can that's appropriate for that game. All right, next one. And this is again, look, it can be hard to be a referee, but you all know that, right? I mean, we volunteered for this really weird thing. Like, I'll I get to speak all over the country and other subjects, and like my weird ass hobby is I love to be in the middle of a high school rivalry game where everyone wants to kill each other. Because actually, actually, the players I find are awesome. By and large, the players are awesome. And if you can find that player who's the leader on the team early in the game and make like friends like you're on my team, like help me, like help me here. Like that goes a long way. Um, all right, next slide. If there's another slide. James. Okay. So um, if you've never heard anything like this, um, I would just encourage you to think about some of the ideas I've given you, to try at the very least with the this guy's getting mad, and I'm not gonna respond with mad. I recognize the pressure the coach is under. I'm gonna do the slow walk, I'm gonna think very carefully about my words, and I'm gonna try to de-escalate this situation. We're gonna have a really good pregame. The pregame is not don't screw it up. That's BS. You don't see MLS referees going, uh, here's my pregame, rivalry game, don't screw it up. Have a good, complete pregame, have a checklist for that and address escalating behavior early before it fully erupts. I don't even know if there's another slide there, James. I think we're good on that. Imagine a place, imagine a time. And I do this, so I do a lot of speaking. I wrote a book for teenage referees about the mindset side of the game. I believe that we can, the sane adults in the room, can save the game, can save youth sports from some of the crap that fills at least my social media feed, which is all like badass videos of referees getting attacked and parents going crazy. Um, but it takes all of us, it takes courage, it takes an understanding that this is part of our job. It's not just calling balls and strikes and handballs or offset and things like that, but it's going out there to really protect the game. I believe the vision is achievable. And if anybody at any time ever wants to have a discussion about this, or you have a bad game or challenging game, as we all do. Like if you've been in this long enough and you haven't had a shit show, like you just haven't done the right level games right yet. Right. But there's a number of us who with a ton of experience, we're happy to walk you through um, you even watch game tape, right? Help you so that you feel safe, you feel good about the work that you do, you enjoy it. And I tell you, you are adding a benefit to society in a kind of crazy world sometimes out there, when we help these kids, these young athletes, be able to have a safe, sane environment for playing soccer. Okay, thank you for letting me spout my opinions.

SPEAKER_00:

That's it for today's episode of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where we're rewriting the rules of what it means to build a great law practice and a great life. If something sparked a new idea or gave you clarity, pass it on. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who's ready to think bigger. Want more tools, strategies, and stories from the trenches? Visit GreatLegalMarketing.com or connect with Ben Glass and the team on LinkedIn.

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