coaching: combination of respect, friendship
During the Women’s Final Four a couple of weeks back, an article appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that addressed the coach-athlete relationship. The context was the late-season resignation of a very successful college coach amid allegations that she crossed, in the words of sports writer Vic Dorr Jr. “the gulf that typically separates adult instructors from young students.”
The coach’s alleged improprieties are cause for concern, even alarm, and from all indications the grounds for her departure from the program she had played a huge part in building were completely justified. The story of her fall from grace had been well documented by the media for several weeks, so the news was hardly fresh.
What caught my attention, instead, were comments by two veteran coaches interviewed for the T-D piece. One, who was slightly older than her players when her career began, said, “I wanted it understood that I was your coach and your teacher; that I was not your friend.”
Another offered, “My objective has never been to have the players as my friends. I’m the coach and they must respect me and they must realize that no, we’re not friends.”
What she said next -- “It’s not that I don’t want to have a great relationship with them because we work very hard at that.” – seemed to temper her previous statement. Then she added, “But my objective is not friendship. My objective is for you as a player to respect me.”
OK, maybe I’m playing with semantics here, maybe I’m naïve, and maybe I just don’t understand the high-pressure world of big-time college sports, but what leaped off the page at me was the use of the words “friend” and “respect.”
Almost four decades ago as a 20-year-old University of Richmond junior, I drew my first Collegiate paycheck for assisting with Middle School sports. Since then, I’ve constantly examined my motivation for coaching and assessed and reassessed my goals. Each time, I’ve concluded that what called me to the profession in the first place and what has me here still are the same: my friendships with the athletes entrusted to me and sharing with them a bond based on earned respect.
Simply put, being a coach and being a friend are in no way mutually exclusive. In fact, that relationship is the time-honored cornerstone of the Collegiate culture. Obviously, there’s a distinct line that neither adult nor child can ever cross.
Coaches must set rules and enforce them, and, sure, there are times when discipline, even tough love, is necessary. Coaches must foster an atmosphere of trust. They must convey the message that team success is more important than individual accolades and that the athletic experience is a metaphor for life. They must create situations where young men and women step outside their comfort zones. They must demand their athletes’ best, but doing so doesn’t mean demanding respect or even being adversarial, which brings me to my next point.
Coaches don’t automatically get respect when they pick up their clipboard and whistle from the athletic directors’ office, and they certainly don’t get it by being heavy-handed or controlling. Instead, they must earn it each day through preparation and passion. They earn it by communicating, by being positive, by keeping their cool, by showing interest in their athletes beyond the field or court or diamond or track, by praising them when they succeed and helping them up when they fall. Mainly, they earn it by being fair.
Long after the memories of events have faded, the trophies packed away, and the records rewritten, friendship and respect alone remain. They are truly the essence of the coach-athlete relationship.
