Category: Coaching

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The Incognito Incident: A Character Lesson for Coaches

This past month we’ve been swamped by the media storm surrounding the behavior of Miami Dolphin football player Richie Incognito. In short, Jonathan Martin an NFL football player for the Miami Dolphins left the team and checked into a hospital for emotional distress, claiming harassment from teammate Richie Incognito. Martin felt threatened by Incognito’s approach to “toughening him up” (Schefter, 2013). If true, the incident illustrates harassment in the workplace and a lack of leadership by the Miami Dolphin organization. In addition, it speaks to the important responsibility of coaches in creating a positive environment (i.e. team culture) in which athletes can grow and develop while striving for success (Brown, 2003).

Obviously, the main purpose of sport at the professional level is to win and make money. However, winning and profit-seeking does not eliminate the ethical responsibility of the organization and coach to provide a safe environment, where players and coaches treat each other with respect (Simon, 2013). When someone inflicts physical or psychological harm on another person they are demonstrating a lack of respect for the individual (Lumpkin, Stoll, & Beller, 2011). Intimidating someone or bullying them is a form of emotional and psychological coercion or hazing (Tilindiene & Gailiuniene, 2013). Regardless of your view on the severity of Richie Incognito’s actions towards Jonathan Martin, it’s tough to argue the behavior of Incognito was anything less than hazing.

Hazing in sports is defined as, “…any potentially humiliating, degrading, abusive, or dangerous activity which does not contribute to the positive development of the athlete…” (Crow & MacIntosh, 2009, p. 449). The Incognito incident demonstrated all the common signs of hazing in sports. Incognito held seniority status over Martin, Martin exhibited signs of emotional distress, and the language (i.e. racial slurs) Incognito verbalized via voicemail to Martin demonstrated a lack of respect.

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How Athletic Directors Can Cope With Rheumatoid Arthritis

Introduction

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease that affects the joints and synovial fluid of the joint (CDC, 2010). According to the CDC, in 2005 1.5 million people in the USA were affected with RA. It’s a disease that presently cannot be cured and treatment is not always effective. RA inflames the infected joints and with inflammation comes chronic pain (CDC, 2010). In addition to pain to the joints, RA makes it harder to use them. It can affect people at any age and is not age specific. This is problematic for Athletic Directors because the pain has to be dealt with while working in an often physically challenging environment.

The Disease Physically, Mentally, and Spiritually

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How a “Beginner’s Mind” Can Improve Your Teaching and Coaching

Success enjoyed by individuals attempting something for the first time occurs so frequently that it’s taken on the familiar moniker “beginner’s luck.” But rather than luck, perhaps there’s more to these frequent successful occurrences. It’s my experience that success often comes because beginners aren’t encumbered with fears of previous failures. The Japanese term “shoshin” translates as “beginner’s mind.” Author Shunryu Suzuki commented, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”¹ As teachers and coaches, I believe there are advantages if we deliberately maintain a beginner’s mind throughout our endeavors. Often we can achieve greater results and enjoy deeper personal satisfaction.

Picture yourself at the beginning of the year. Your students/athletes are seeing you for the first time after an extended period and seem relatively happy about it. Some seem to have grown, some perhaps matured, and some might be brand new faces altogether; but at this moment all things are possible. Now let’s imagine two separate scenarios. First, you use experience to inform the decisions you make regarding class/practice structure, class/team management issues, and of course to shape your personal philosophy. Experience combined with a beginner’s mind allows us to clearly see how past practices can be built upon (e.g. enhanced time management during class or practice episodes, clarity in the pitfalls of wasting time with elements that bear little fruit in the broader picture, etc), and can better help us attain our goals.

In contrast, experience’s less helpful cousin is the expert mindset. The expert mindset creates a scenario where pessimism creeps in at the first sign of trouble. The expert mindset doesn’t use experience as a teacher but rather a predictor of fortunes to come. With the expert mindset guiding our thinking we bemoan errors during instruction rather than giving better explanations or trying different ways to solve problems. We are unhappy with our students and complain more. With the expert mindset firmly in place we tend to quickly abandon the “well intentioned” plans of high performance at the first signs of trouble and replace them with a cobbled together mishmash of something destined to cause the least amount of confusion. What’s worse is that in the expert’s mind, “It was all inevitable in the first place. You could see it coming a mile away!”

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Use Your School’s Physical Education Program as the Mother-Lode For Building Your Sports Programs

Interscholastic sports coaches all want to win. We all want to have the best team, the best players, and have our team compete for regional or state championship. One of the best ways to do this is to use your school’s physical education program to identify and recruit athletically talented students.

 

Over the years, in my role as athletic director for a very large school district with multiple schools, I’ve witnessed every level of athletic performance in all the sports we offer. Invariably, when I speak to those coaches with poor performance records they lament about the lack of talent in their school (e.g. “We are in a down cycle for athletes”), the “bad attitude” of their players, or the lack of desire among their students to play sports.” But when asked about what they are doing to get students out for their sports, these coaches give vague responses and rarely share with me any specific strategies they are using to find, recruit, or develop their talent base.

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Preparing for the New School Year

What are YOU doing to prepare for a new school year? Truthfully, if you are a proactive athletic administrator and/or coach, you are preparing all year long. This Coaching and Sport Section will cover several areas of concern for interscholastic athletic program administrators, and may help teachers and parents understand the challenges an athletic program endures behind the scenes.

Spring 2013 I had the opportunity and pleasure to tour Dorman High School campus with director of athletics, Flynn Harrell. This month I called upon him to respond to some questions about the challenges of an athletic administrator preparing for a new year. Thanks To Flynn I was able to pull the following article together.

Here are two links to documents used by Dorman High Athletics that can be used for ideas within your own athletic department. One is Dorman High School Athletic Policy, and the other is Spartanburg School District Six Coaches’ Manual 3013-14.

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The Power of a Coach

The role of a coach is multidimensional and their responsibilities are diverse. Regardless of competitive level a coach can serve as a teacher of strategy and technique, or a source of emotional support and/or motivation. Coaches are teachers. The good ones teach not only how to perform a physical skill and play a game, but also how to constructively handle oneself in and out of competition. They can have a significant impact on the development of the individuals with whom they work.

Today I work as a professor in a Kinesiology program at a small public college in the Northwest. Prior to beginning my time in academia, I lived the life of a college student-athlete and then later as a college coach. My experiences are cherished and shape my perspectives on work ethic, personal relationships, and self-confidence.

Many of my students aspire to become physical education teachers, coaches, or athletic administrators. In and out of class we discuss the importance of sound leadership in the positive development of youth. Many of my students have chosen their degree path and professional aspirations because of interactions with an inspirational coach and/or teacher from their youth. In addition to loving movement and physical activity, they too want to positively impact others. They recognize the power and meaning of such a relationship because they benefited from one.

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Sink or Swim? How to Produce Annual Improvement

This year the USA Swimming National Championships were held the week of June 25 – 29 in Indianapolis, IN. Many swimmers, some more widely known than others, all put forth their finest effort to try and capture their best performance ever and a chance to compete on the US National Team at the World Championships.

Like many sports, in swimming you can have your top performance but still fall short of beating your opponents. However, you must reach a time standard in order to reach the National Championships in the first place. This established standard is a goal all swimmers can aspire to in their training, when they begin to understand how they measure up across the national swimming spectrum (I wish they had one of these standards for my drop shot). If indeed a swimmer is to consider him/herself an ‘elite’ swimmer, they should be able to set these time standards as goals, and work to improve their times annually in order to accomplish these goals at the peak of their swimming primes.

In 1999 USA Swimming initiated the Olympic Trials Project. This project was established because, “Continued success at the international level is one of the primary goals of USA Swimming. To achieve this goal, it is critical to understand the factors that relate to success in swimming. One means of learning about success is to study the characteristics or qualities of successful individuals; to profile our elite swimmers.”¹

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