I came across this article on my Facebook feed. Every tactic described in the article (yelling, demeaning, shaming, sending gymnasts home, physical punishment-in the form of rope climbs, etc.) happened at my daughter’s gym. As someone who has never participated in sports, I assumed this happened in all sports. Are these tactics used in other sports? Maybe not in school sports (where coaches would be held more accountable), but club sports? http://tinssp.com/usag-sexual-abuse-scandal-is-a-symptom-of-deeper-issues/
I googled his name recently to see the status of the case and found that his office was literally right next door to my undergrad apartment. Gave me the creeps by proxy.
This was NOT my experience in sports until high school. And then I quit. I screwed up my knee and just decided I didn’t want to go back. My couches would punish me by making me run suicides because I couldn’t do it X seconds. I couldn’t do it because my asthma was kicking up. That was my last straw.
Sure, my coaches were intense but only one was ever really bad and I left the team (and he got kicked out of the league once I spoke up).
There are ‘yeller’ coaches and there are coaches who use other methods. The coach of the women’s lacrosse team at Louisville was just fired. That’s a big time program and she made a lot of money, but she was a yeller. There have been complaints about her for years but of course the AD at Louisville did nothing to Rick Pitino or the football coach so he didn’t really care about women’s lax. New AD, new round of complaints, now she’s out. Accused of leaving a player at an out of town game, making players do push ups in an airport after a loss, allowed hazing. More than half the team transferred after last season, including two all-Americans.
There is always going to be punishments for being late to practice or disrespecting the coach, and running laps or climbing ropes are not out of line but humiliating players is.
I heard about this guy at least a year ago. I don’t think he is any more special than any other abuser of kids.
He just happens to be scum with a good story (and he had a good one).
When you put scum in a position of power with a kid afraid to speak out and parents unwilling to listen, this is what can happen.
I was a competitive swimmer for years. I swam for three club teams in different areas(Washington and CA), a high school team, and eventually in college. I never had a coach who yelled like that. They would yell occasionally for bad behavior (rough play, pulling on the lane lines, etc.) and would kick people out of the pool for the day, but there was never anything remotely resembling abuse.
By contrast, my son had a Little League coach, another dad, who screamed at everyone, including the parents. That was it for us. Some people should never be put in positions of authority over children.
ETA: The YMCA where I work out has a gymnastics team. The weight room overlooks their workout area, so you can hear and see everything that goes on. Maybe this is the solution? I’ve only heard positive stuff from the coach, even when he has to yell at the girls for doing dangerous, stupid things.
“Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” which described the horrific experiences of girls in gymnastics and ice skating, was first published in 1995. The author was particularly critical of Bella Karolyi.
Sometimes it takes you by surprise. My daughter was playing in a game and the coach let the asst coach handle this one game. The Asst coach had been a coach at this other school. We lost by a lot. She went nuts, had our kids doing push ups and running sprints on the field after the game. I just frozen but should have walked out on the field and said “ENOUGH” I think someone might have talked to her because it never happened again, and then we left that school and there was no more team.
If it happened again, I’d confront the coach. My daughter would die of embarrassment but I’d do it.
There are several prominent gymnastics coaches who use these tactics. I think it’s very common in that sport, especially since it is, for the most part, a non-school sport for most gymnasts. And parents are willing for their kids to be abused by these “successful” coaches that have a record of producing Olympic level athletes (Like Bela Karolyi^, but he’s definitely not the only one). I was a gymnast and I witnessed that type of behavior from coaches, but my coach was the complete opposite - very positive and encouraging.
I did have a basketball coach that was a real jerk. Of course he was successful so the school and parents let him get away with it.
I don’t doubt for a minute that those tactics aren’t a part of other sports also. But my girls have been involved in sports (not gymnastics) for years and haven’t had to deal with any kind of harsh treatment from their club or school coaches. They weren’t on highly competitive teams though.
The only abusive behavior with my girls’ clubs teams that I’ve witnessed has happened between the coaches and their own daughters who were members of the team. I felt really badly for those girls. They got yelled at during and after games and most likely at home also.
Our D had a very bad basketball coach who heavily favored his S who bullied and hit our D (who was on his team). Finally, she hauled off and hit him back, knocking him on his bum, and he was stunned, as was his daddy, the coach. All the parents present applauded. The coach had the nerve to ask why she hit him and she said she was tired of waiting for the coach to keep him from hurting her and others but the coach NEVER did anything so she had to defend herself.
Of course, the coach had her play as little as possible for the entire season but his son never hit D again. We were proud of D for handling herself so well and she felt validated by us and all the other parents. Many of the kids on D’s team quit basketball after that season because of the awful coach.
This is not a case of yelling – this is sexual abuse of minors, which the University had received complaints about and told victims they were imagining or misinterpreting events. After which, the abuse continued even after criminal complaints were made, at which point Michigan tried for damage control. Read the Post story and you wonder how it took so long to do something.
I wonder if this equates to telling male athletes to “shake off” a concussion or injury, but why is the outcry here less than for Sandusky? Age of the victims, sport involved, what is it ? Or are we seeing the effects of socializing women to defer to authority?
Perhaps we (or many) are exhausted by so many harassers everywhere, compounded by mass shootings, and a volatile political situation that makes many uneasy. I know all the bad news makes me very weary.
One of my DDs was a gymnast until the ripe old age of 10. She was very good and having been around the gym a lot, I never heard coaches yelling at older girls. Switch to swimming and many years later, no issues with a coach. All swim coaches are “animated” during a swim, but ironically most swimmers will say they can’t hear them! There is another local team where I hear that coaches will hold back on team travel if athlete underperforms in their opinion. Or won’t provide a benefit like a free suit but that’s all kind of mind games.
There is absolutely no reason for coaches to be demeaning and verbally abusive. If they can’t coach a team well enough without using these tactics, punishment or negative attention, they shouldn’t be allowed to coach. I for one would pull my kid off the team so fast…regardless of what they wanted or the team needed. I did switch my son from one town’s Little League to another town d/t what I considered inappropriate coaching (S was about 10). He also played baseball and football for his high school freshman year and one of the reasons he switched to a different high school was the coaches of the two teams, they took all the fun out of playing. He loved his new high school teams and coaching staff. The difference…Division 1 vs. Division 3. He was good enough to play D1 but had much more fun with D3 play.
Perhaps all coaches need to be equipped with body cams.
My daughters both did sports, the older horseback riding, the younger gymnastics. There was only one mean instructor, for horseback riding, and we pulled our daughter from his program, with our daughter’s encouragement and agreement, very quickly.
Absolutely not. One of my kids fenced at the club of a coach who was coaching the US women’s team to a medal performance in the Olympics while my D was getting lessons at the club. This coach often taught her classes, and we also often saw him giving private lessons to one of the four Olympians on his team who was from our club. I never saw him yell at or belittle or punish a fencer even once in the 3 years my kid was there (and I spent hours in the gym observing because it was far enough from home that I drove my kid and just watched from just a few feet away --small gym – then drove her home).
Once I saw him get mad at someone administering a tournament when they messed up something that cost his club kids a fair shot at the medal round. But I never saw him do anything but coach, encourage, demonstrate, and maybe show a little disappointment in his fencers (and that only in practice when they were goofing off). He is passionate about the sport, but wants the kids to find their own internal motivation to do well.
One of the problems with the sex abuse of minors is that the institution that is responsible for stopping it is the one that will be liable for a passel of lawsuits once it comes to light. It’s as simple as that. And its why many organizations simply try to put a halt to it without publicity and without criminal prosecution of the person. That’s my observation.
As far as abusive coaching goes, its my experience that the incidence of abusive jerks in coaching is inversely related to the coach’s personal history of achievement in the sport. The higher the level of success the coach had, the less nasty and demeaning he is. There are exceptions, but I think there aren’t that many coaches who had high levels of personal success who beat up their athletes gratuitously. Most of the offenders fall into the wannabe or never-were group.
^^That isn’t necessarily true in all Olympic sports. There are sports where the elite/Olympic levels are dominated by coaches from one particular region of the world. For many of these coaches, harsh criticism, yelling, and screaming are commonplace in every day life as well as in coaching. My kid was on a US national team and competed internationally, she saw verbally abusive coaches all the time and they tended to be from countries that had the best athletes in the sport.
Since the last Olympics the USOC has established a SafeSport policy/committee that has as its mission to keep Olympic sports free from sexual, physical, and verbal abuse (bullying, harassment, etc). Beginning earlier this year, the governing body of each Olympic Sport was required to set up policies/procedures/training to ensure athlete safety. Many governing bodies (e.g., USA Track and Field, USA Swimming, US Rowing, USA Volleyball, and USA Gymnastics) already have policies in place and athletes have a way to complain. Nothing will change overnight but you have to start somewhere to change the culture among coaches on how to train and motivate athletes. My kid is involved with the governing body of her sport and is one of a group of people from all parts if the sports who can hear complaints/violations of the Safe Sport policy. I am not saying this solves the problem, but it is baby steps in the right direction.
@Bromfield12 my daughter’s main coaches were from Soviet bloc countries and I wonder if that had something to do with how they coached-maybe it’s what they were used to or how they themselves were coached (one coach was a former Olympian and the other was very highly ranked but did not make it to the Olympics because of the USSR boycott of the Olympics in 1984). At any rate, yelling and belittling was par for the course and my daughter often had stomach aches before going in to gym. We tried to get her to quit but she loved her sport and options were limited in the area as for gyms that actually got their athletes recruited for college. So, she stayed until she graduated from high school but not without a lot of tears and angst. The thing that startled me recently was when my daughter said “I know that Coach X yelled at us but she really loved us.”