On misunderstanding the maltreatment of athletes.
This post is part two of a series.
In my last post, I talked about my experience as a young gymnast in the ‘80s and early ‘90s in training environments of fear and intimidation, in which coaches forced kids to perform dangerous skills under various threats, punished them for their vulnerabilities, and used any negative means they could think of to get the performance they wanted. In such training environments, personally demeaning messages that you were a disappointment, a waste of time, or worthless were par for the course. The dismissal of pain and injuries as lies or laziness was also common. The toxic training environment was filled with an array of terrors that led to trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze), as well as dread, anxiety, depression, shame, loss of trust, and powerlessness, among other things, including injuries that could never heal. It also led (not surprisingly) to a deterioration of performance.
Not all coaches subscribed to negative coaching methods, but enough did that you couldn’t escape it in a 10-15-year career as coaches turned over in your own gym, as you moved to different gyms, as you had private lessons with different coaches, and as you participated in various camps. In that era, we (athletes) had no language to depict what was going on or how it was affecting us. And even if we could find the words, we lived in a culture where the threat of retaliation loomed over complaints and kept us silent.
You might wonder where the parents were while all of this was going on.
On the one hand, a lot of parents were working full time and using sports as a kind of afterschool daycare… one that had achievements built in (good for bragging rights). Parents generally trusted coaches with their kids, even though club coaches had no teaching credentials, no training in child development, no basic course in ethics, and, frequently, no background check.
While some parents were simply not present, other parents who did attend practice would, step by step, be pushed back from the training space (e.g., have their bleachers removed) until they were out of earshot (and put in a glassed-in viewing room). From time to time, they’d get “banned” from practice altogether by certain coaches so that they “wouldn’t be a distraction.” Today, that might be recognized as an obvious red flag that misconduct is going on in the gym, but back then, the rationale seemed reasonable to parents.
Parents’ Interpretation of Maltreatment as Tough Coaching
I’d like to say that parents didn’t know that the “maltreatment” was happening. But, I really can’t. Perhaps people didn’t yet use the term “emotional abuse” back then, but the environment of fear and intimidation was on display at big competitions for all the families in the stands to see. The absolute power of the coach, the methods of “negative reinforcement,” the little robotic girls in leotards with pretty ribbons in their hair, getting chewed out, afraid to speak, afraid to smile, given death stares when they ate a snack, whispered to a friend, or tried to comfort each other after a fall… it was all accepted as normal and even necessary in order to extract a winning performance from children.
The gyms under the greatest authoritarian rule were popularly considered the “best gyms with the best coaches and athletes.” Most parents convinced themselves that what was going on at these gyms (and those that imitated them) was just “tough coaching” — something akin to strict teaching, or giving kids challenging assignments. What they didn’t understand was the threatening nature of the assignments. Being “assigned” to throw back flips on a balance beam when you were not ready to do so was less like being asked to read difficult chapters in a book, and more like being forced to play Russian roulette… and then being told you were a “bad girl” if you refused to pull the trigger. They thought of the coaching methods as a form of “discipline” or “motivation” that made kids stronger, better, and advance more quickly. They seemed to be caught up in the idea that because the coach had specialized knowledge about the sport, they were also the authority on how to treat children.
Many parents also seemed to get caught up in the Olympic or NCAA dream and become emotionally invested in seeing their kid become a champion, get a scholarship, or achieve some other moment of glory. They seemed to deem the treatment “worth it” if it increased their kids’ chances, even while watching their own kids’ personalities become unrecognizably solemn and anxious.
Coaches’ Interpretation of Maltreatment as a Best Practice
Most coaches, likewise, seemed to celebrate the fear-based approach to coaching (demeaning language, insults, intimidation, threats, punishments) as a “best practice.” I recall watching as young coaches began increasing tactics of control until they had reached a level of domination that they believed would yield “success.” They appeared to believe they were there for the sole purpose of creating champions and that “anything goes” to fulfill that goal. Terrifying kids and making them feel bad about themselves was a way, they believed, to get the best performance out of them. If they could use coercion and force to the point of taking away an athlete’s sense of independent thinking, feeling, or choosing, then they could break you, possess you, and control your every move. They seemed to think this was a great show of their own strength— and with some rationale I will never understand, that it would make kids stronger.
Once an authoritarian regime was solidified on a particular team, morale dropped, injuries were ever-present, disordered eating started to take hold, and more kids quit. You’d think that coaches would notice that breaking down kids’ bodies and spirits, and losing them from the sport, was not conducive to “success.” But from most coaches’ perspectives, athletes quitting was some kind of righteous elimination of weak links. Athletes could be chewed up, spit out, and replaced. Coaches would declare: “We don’t want people on the team who aren’t ‘committed’ anyway.” We never spoke of the “quitters” again. They were treated as examples of weakness, to be forgotten, and exiled.
Another Way
To stop the transition to authoritarian coaching from happening, there had to be senior coaches with strong philosophical commitments to positive coaching and ethics in place. For a couple of years, I benefited from the presence of such a coach. I will always be grateful to have been shown the difference between a healthy versus toxic approach to coaching in those years.
Though I still didn’t know anything about the concept of emotional abuse at that time (in my mid-teens), nor much about philosophy or ethics, these experiences helped me to draw a kind picture for myself of healthy versus toxic training environments that I carried with me for the rest of my career. I used it to evaluate what was going on at my own gym and those I came in contact with, and it ultimately gave me the courage to say “enough is enough” when I retired from the sport in college.
Stay tuned for an experience-based sketch of healthy versus toxic training environments in part three.
