Written by Picking up where we left off last week in “Five Harmful Trends to Watch As Sports Restart Post-Covid,” and building off Culture in Sports colleague’s Paul Robbins “The 5 Essentials for Becoming a Professional Sports Coach,” this week, we want to speak directly to coaches. Hopefully, athletes and parents will read this, too, as we explore this most impactful and consequential relationship and perhaps give dedicated and well-meaning coaches some insight where the booby traps and pitfalls are and can be lurking.
The relationship between coach and athlete is a special one. It is a deeper and more complex one than virtually any teaching or mentoring relationship. On its best days, the coaching relationship has quasi-parental aspects. It also does on its worst days, too. On the plus side of the ledger, the coach has the benefits of both extraordinary impact and the ability to more objectively guide the athlete to goals both imagined and unimaginable. On the downside, coaches, like parents and athletes, are human, fallible and can make mistakes both of omission and commission. Recognition of the potential pitfalls and booby traps that come with the fallibility is the key to avoiding these. Today, we highlight five mistakes that range in seriousness but are all consequential and avoidable.
1. REACTING, RATHER THAN COACHING
This is the most ordinary of mistakes a coach can make. But in being ordinary, that also means it is common, which means it happens all too often. certainly more than it should. The hardest part of coaching is controlling one’s own innate reactions to gaps in an athlete’s performance or failure to do what has been taught and remembering to actually coach. Remembering to separate the performance from the person in the critique is a helpful coaching point and it will help in helping prevent the misuse of power discussed below, too. In a recent high level university presentation on best (and worst) practices, a coach responding with anger, judgment, or criticism, rather than with analysis and measured correction was the nearly unanimously cited example of recalled bad coaching and lived experience. By “recalled bad coaching,” that meant recalled from yesterday’s practice to recalled from a practice 38 years ago. The staying power of a coach reacting, rather than coaching, or failing to offer correction in a crucial moment, can be as long as an athlete’s memory. It can determine nothing less than how a coach will be remembered. No coach is perfect and invariably every coach will make this mistake at some point. But greater recognition and consciously avoiding emotional, knee-jerk reactions and favoring the offering of correction as the first response is the key to avoid making this mistake.
2. MISUSING THE COACH’S POWER AGAINST AN ATHLETE
Coaches come in all shapes, sizes, and volumes. Athletes respond differently to different leadership attributes and styles, but if you think back to the most effective coaching and learning environments, they are overwhelmingly ones where a confident coach was very much in charge but used that power gently. Rather, they asked the athlete to raise their level to meet the expectations of the group or team. John Wooden is perhaps the most famous example of this kind of culturally and ethically-grounded soft power coach. But I can think in my own playing career across a range of sports of multiple examples of coaches who didn’t threaten, raise their voice, or misuse their power, but still maintained very high standards. Even my favorite coach, the one I am closest to today, who could raise his volume and bluster always delivered his strongest messages quietly to me.
Similarly, the majority of coaching crises that I’ve investigated in my career come when a coach uses power to diminish or harm an athlete or the team itself. This is because of the inherent power the coaching relationship already confers on the coach is so great. None of this means that a coach won’t have to deliver criticism, bad news, and at times even crushing news to athletes, but doing so with care and sensitivity and without misusing power keeps those difficult moments from ricocheting back at the coach.
3. USING CONDITIONING AS PUNISHMENT
One of best perks of my current day job is getting to work with Dr. Carl Ohlson. Dr. Ohlson, in addition to being an acclaimed performance psychologist, is also a retired Army Lt. Colonel and Ranger- qualified. He previously led the Center for Enhanced Performance at the United States Military Academy. Dr. Ohlson will be the first to tell you that the U.S. military has long since moved away punitive training methods and now favors a process he describes as “retraining to Standard.” If the top fighting force in the world has left repetitious punishment behind, isn’t time to do this in sports.
Retraining to standard is focused on quickly correcting non-conforming behavior, with enhanced appropriate behavior. If an athlete is late to practice, then that athlete needs to be first out the rest of the week. This doesn’t mean consequences and responsibility are eliminated, but physical conditioning is neither an effective punishment or a method of correcting irresponsible and non-conforming behavior. It is also enormously risky given the range of health harms that can occur when an athlete is overworked, from death to rhabdo to overuse injury, can be significant. Again, none of this suggests corrective work or careful additional conditioning work after practice is wrong- there is a difference between assigning carefully curated amounts of additional work in which the athlete can demonstrate mastery- it just should never be deployed as punishment.
4. DISCRIMINATING AGAINST AN ATHLETE
This is a complicated issue, but let me simply appeal to the coach within you. Would you like to be the coach that said to the next Willie Mays, Wilma Rudolph, or Greg Louganis they couldn’t play for you because they aren’t like the others? Didn’t think so!
If you are willing to miss out on the chance to work with an athlete who honors the sport, competes with dignity, and has the ability to transcend the game, because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, poverty or wealth, language, political views, hairstyle, or background, the shortcoming is your own. Most instances where discrimination takes place aren’t so clear cut and we won’t always agree or see things the same way, but from the beginning, sport has been a playing field leveler in society and it is a place where we expand our understanding of one another and ourselves.
5. COMMITTING SEXUAL MISCONDUCT AGAINST AN ATHLETE
The inherent power imbalance between athlete and coach is such that it is categorically wrong for a coach to engage in a sexual relationship of any kind with an athlete in their charge.
The U.S. Center for Safe Sport has established rules that have prohibited not only sexual misconduct, exploitation, and harassment, but also consensual relationships between younger athletes and coaches. They have no place in sports. Every athlete has a right to be free from sexual misconduct, exploitation, and harassment. And any coach who departs from this, isn’t going to be a coach for long, and does not deserve to be.