Parents have a direct influence on the children’s moral judgments by communicating beliefs, values, and expectations about the child’s likelihood for success and the relative value of participating in achievement-oriented areas. In fact, parents are the primary influences upon children’s self-perceptions through the feedback they provide for efforts in achievement-related domains (Babkes, 1996). In addition, several resources, including peers, school, media, and organizations are critical to the development of children’s health-related behaviors, but none as critical as the parents (Anderssen and Wold, 1992). Early research determined that parents also have an impact on their children’s sport experiences (Greendorfer, 1977). Studies of athletes, age nine and older, show positive correlations between their perceptions of the amount of parental encouragement, interest or involvement and athletes levels of enjoyment and participation (Power and Woolger, 1994). Finally, as in academics, parents begin involvement in their children’s sports in an instructive role, and continue to play an active role in providing opportunities (Power and Woolger, 1994). Parents, in turn, have expectations of coaches, relative to conveying the foundational ideologies surrounding morals, social development, health behaviors as well as continued involvement in sport. This investigation was somewhat exploratory in nature but will lead to a more in depth qualitative investigation. This study was conducted using a self-report questionnaire. It was completed by 142 parents of 9-12 year old athletes at the conclusion of a summer youth soccer program run by a southern city of 70,000 inhabitants. Descriptive statistics of the 60 questions revealed that questions designed to measure 1) moral development, 2) social development, 3) health related behaviors and 4) the importance of sport participation according to the parents (e.g. it is ok for my child to break rules; this program introduced my child to a healthy lifestyle; my child learned to get along better with others; it is important to me that my child participate in sports) The results showed mean scores ranging from 1.4 to 4.7 on a 5-point Likert scale. The scores imply that one of the perceived roles of this program and perhaps more importantly the coach, according to the parents, was that it was a vehicle through which young children can learn moral behavior, social development, health behaviors and the importance of sport involvement.Keyword(s): community-based programs, recreation programming, youth sports