Coaching elite young athletes gets harder

When coach Pat Summitt ruled the court at Tennessee, her authority was unchallenged, and her teams won 1,098 games over a 21-year career.

This week marks a dual commemoration: the 45th anniversary of the signing of Title IX coincides with the first anniversary of the passing of Pat Summitt, who turned that law into such an equal rights spear for women.

So it seems right to dwell for a moment on the collective state of young female athletes on campuses today, to ask whether they are weaker or stronger than yesterday and whether Pat could be the same kind of force for them in this current snowflakey, iGen safe-space climate. The truth? She might get herself fired.

The data show that since Summitt left coaching in 2011, female athletes have become more anxious, more prone to depression, less adult, and more insecure than ever before. What is up with that?

According to a 2016 NCAA survey, 76 per cent of all Division I female athletes said they would like to go home to their moms and dads more often, and 64 per cent said they communicate with their parents at least once a day, a number that rises to 73 per cent among female basketball players. And nearly a third reported feeling overwhelmed.

Social psychologists say these numbers aren’t surprising, but rather reflect a larger trend in all college students that is attributable at least in part to a culture of hovering parental involvement, participation-trophies, and constant connectivity via smartphones and social media, which has not made adolescents more secure and independent, but less.

Since 2012, there has been a pronounced spike in mental health issues on campuses, with almost 58 per cent of students reporting anxiety, and 35 per cent experiencing depression, according to annual freshman surveys and other assessments.

Research psychologist Jean Twenge wrote a forthcoming book pointedly entitled IGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. She says the new generation of students is preoccupied with safety. “Including what they call ‘emotional safety,’” she said. “Perhaps because they grew up interacting online and through text, they believe words can incur damage.”

Accompanying this anxiety, iGens have unrealistic expectations and exaggerated opinions of themselves. Nearly 60 per cent of high school students say they expect to get a graduate degree, when just nine to 10 per cent actually will. Fully 47 per cent of Division I female basketball players think it’s at least “somewhat likely” they will play pro or Olympic ball, but the reality? The WNBA drafts just 36 players, 0.9 per cent.

“If you compare iGen to gen-Xers or boomers, they are much more likely to say their abilities are ‘above average,’” Twenge said.

This combination of dissonant factors is creating an increasingly tense relationship between overconfident yet anxious players, and coaches who bring them down to earth. In women’s sports especially, there has been an ugly surge in complaints of “verbal abuse,” with investigations at more than a dozen programs between 2010-2016. In some cases, coaches were relieved for legitimate cause.

But in others, good decorated coaches were suspended, fired, or resigned even though there was no evidence of mistreatment. At Nebraska, Connie Yori was the 2010 coach of the year, and took the Cornhuskers to two Big 12 titles and seven NCAA tournaments in 14 years, before she quit last season in the wake of complaints that she was “overly critical” of players, and made them — or shape them into someone stronger. The choice is ultimately theirs, not the coach’s. And that’s the thing most people miss about coaches: how strangely powerful yet powerless they are, how beholden they are to the aspirations and frailties of other people’s children. It’s a beautiful, terrible relationship that can tilt too easily, and usually tilts hard, into undying loyalty or lifelong hard feelings.

The bottom line is that coaches have a truly delicate job ahead of them with iGens. They must find a way to establish themselves as firm allies of players who are more easily wounded than ever before yet demand they earn praise through genuine accomplishment.

Based on what I knew of Pat and her intuitive dealings with vulnerable players such as Chamique Holdsclaw, who has become a powerful campus mental health advocate, she probably would have found a way to work with and build up iGens, just as she did boomers, gen-Xers, and millennials. But it would not have been an easy adaptation.

Believe it or not, for most of Summitt’s 1,098-victory career at Tennessee, what she really taught was how to deal with fear, and falling. Only three times did she win championships. All the rest of those seasons ended in some kind of failure.

Much as she loved to see her players win, what she was really interested in was “how they respond,” she said. She said that what she really was trying to do was convert girls into strong, independent women. It was an inevitably painful undertaking.

“If everyone loved it all the time,” she said, “that meant we were doing something wrong.”