BULLY COACHES
Cost of coaching abuse is always high, and sometimes it can take a heavy toll
The testimonials are chilling. The words, in varying degrees of eloquence, all hit with the same hammer impact:
“You are f---ing embarrassing. You’re a f---ing retard. Everybody, look at her — she’s a quitter, and she’s the reason we lost this game.”
“I heard, ‘What the f---? are you doing?’ a lot, but I didn’t know how to respond. I was honestly confused, because I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, but she’d never tell me.”
“I don’t use the word ‘hate’ — it’s not who I am — but that’s how I feel about him.”
“I don’t want to play volleyball anymore. It’s just not fun. Everyone’s always crying, except me. I cry at home.”
It’s painfully obvious that child abuse is alive and well in the world of youth sports. And this issue isn’t just one of hurt feelings — it’s one that nearly cost one B.C. athlete his life.
PUSHED TO THE BRINK
Brandon (not his real name) played hockey in a Greater Vancouver minor hockey association. He was, by his own admission, a good player, although never one who was going to turn pro.
But he was a talented, smooth-skating defenceman with size, and translating his talent into a post-season education was a real possibility.
Hockey was a place for him to bond with friends, the camaraderie that comes with being part of a group that worked together to achieve a goal, the sharing of success forging them together.
He played for six years, and was full of praise for the coaches who helped him. But in his second year of bantam rep — what would be his final hockey season — his team got a new coach, and the verbal assault on his psyche began.
“At the start, I noticed he was a lot harder on me than other people,” said Brandon. “I convinced myself at the start of the year that he just wanted the best for me, he believed in me, and wanted me to be the best player I could be. Part of me still believes that.
“But I’d make a play on the ice, and ... he’d get pretty angry at me. I can recall parents looking at me (in shock), kids from other teams looking at me … ‘Your coach is giving you some s---.’
“My dad asked me if I wanted him to do something about it, and I didn’t, because I felt that would embarrass me in a way. I wasn’t old enough to stand up to a man when I was 14 years old.
“If it happened now, I’d put my foot down and say, ‘Listen, my man, don’t treat me this way.’ But I didn’t have that confidence back then. I think he thought I could take it, that I had the potential to go somewhere in hockey.
“But there was just something about me that he had a problem with. It made me feel bad, and I just didn’t understand why I was getting treated this way and nobody else was. I just didn’t understand.”
One game, with his team trailing 4-1 with five minutes left, Brandon took a penalty. The other team scored on the power play, and they lost 5-2. He was singled out in front of his teammates and blamed for the loss. He was upset after the game. Friends were confused why he was being singled out.
Hockey was the one thing that, Brandon says, kept him “between the lines.” But playing under this coach sapped any joy out of hockey, and with the prospect of having to also play midget hockey under the same guy, he quit.
His best friend watched Brandon’s inner light dim during the season, and fade further away as the scars wrought by the emotional abuse leached into other areas of his life. A difficult home life, being caught up as a pawn in the tug of war that children become in messy divorces, added to Brandon’s burden.
Hockey had dominated his time and weekends, but without that demand on his time, it opened up the door to a new demon: Addiction.
First, it was marijuana and alcohol. Then, going to parties with older friends he looked up to, he was introduced to drugs he’d never tried before. He’d go to school stoned. Then he just stopped going.
And that dark, all-too-common path led to an inevitable ending: an overdose that left him on the floor of a fast-food restaurant. Doctors said if he hadn’t been so large — then 6-1 and 200 pounds — he’d have died.
“Honestly, it was a very short window from when he finished hockey to finding him in a McDonald’s almost dead,” said Brandon’s father.
“I knew he was in trouble, and I knew he was in bad trouble. So when the phone call came, I hate to say it, but I knew it was coming.
“So when I saw him … it’s not a pretty thing to see your kid hooked up to IVs in the hospital. I’m just glad he’s alive.”
Both Brandon and his father acknowledge the role his tumultuous home life played. Dad had to stay away; rules, curfews and parental oversight were non-existent.
“He was like a dog running wild in the street. He turned wild. He was the most polite kid you could imagine, and within three or four months, he was pretty much a wild animal.”
Now, Brandon, 18, is finishing up the rest of the Grade 11 he missed, along with a Grade 12 course load. He plans to attend university, and he’s back playing hockey — but just for fun.
“I’ve learned a lot of things about myself, and the things I need to change,” he said.
“He’s recognizing now that he was talented and that he did have something,” said his father.
“Maybe it is that he comes back and becomes a coach, and maybe becomes a really good one as a result of his (experience). He’s taken responsibility for his part of why he’s not playing hockey.
“(Brandon’s old coach) is causing damage to one or two kids on the team, and maybe the rest can handle it, but those one or two kids are being affected badly,” he added. “And the parents are sitting there, watching this going on, and talking about how it’s good that the kids get to learn about discipline.
“You can discipline a kid … without yelling at him and making him feel like a piece of s---. I made the mistake of not stepping in as a father. And I should have.”
THE COACHING CONUNDRUM
Any coach, parent or player can tell you that athletes are not a homogeneous group. Different approaches are required for different players.
Some thrive under a loud, bombastic leader. Others shrivel. Some need a quiet word. Some don’t need any at all.
Vancouver Whitecaps coach Marc Dos Santos is known as a master motivator; he elicits loyalty and maximum effort from his charges.
The Whitecaps’ oldest player is 32, but the youngest — midfielder Simon Colyn — is only 16.
That’s not a problem for the 41-year-old Dos Santos, who was also the youth academy coordinator for the São Paulo-based Palmeiras, one of Brazil’s largest soccer teams, and led one of their teams to the first U15 national in club history.
He is intense and high-energy. He pushes players to their physical limit, and fully expects his style to aggravate some of them. But he understands that success can only come with mutual respect.
“I found that in both youth and men, it’s all about being honest with people,” he said. “You need a level of honesty. You need to be very real with what you’re saying all the time, and to be fair. No one should be bigger than the club — including myself.
“I don’t want to get respect just because I’m the coach. I want respect because of the quality of the work of the staff. And that level of respect, that’s what brings trust, that’s what brings motivation.
“I coach every player the same way because I’m more focused on the team than the individuals. But there are players I might talk to in a different way; some players that I’ve worked with get pumped if I hold them accountable in front of the group. Then I know I’m going to get the best out of them.
“Others, I can’t do that — so it’s more one-versus-one in my office. But whatever you do, the important thing is not to hide. You have to have those conversations, you have to be direct.”
ABUSE ‘RULES’ RARELY WORK
B.C. Hockey, like every other minor sports association in Canada, has language built into its laws to protect athletes. There are officers responsible for receiving reports of abuse — and taking action against those who do it.
Some 50 associations in B.C. have signed on to the Respect In Sport Pledge, which outlines the three steps to responsible coaching. But the reality is, these checks and balances rarely work. Reports of abuse disappear into a bureaucratic black hole, administrators protect their coaches or enable them.
Scan the headlines. There are Jeff and Rachelle Thompson at Penn State, who terrorized their gymnasts for nearly a decade. The fallout of Larry Nassar’s tenure with U.S. gymnastics and Michigan State is a woeful combination of wilful ignorance at its best, and psychopathic, pathological behaviour at worst — and it still pales compared with the monstrous crimes Nassar committed. He was just sentenced to up to 175 years in prison.
In Brandon’s case, his father received an email recently from the association’s risk management and player rep. Brandon quit hockey in the fall of 2016. The coach in question is still there.
Dr. Jennifer Fraser is an award-winning educator and author, whose third book is titled The Bullied Brain: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About Brain Scars And How To Heal Them.
She’s also the mother of a young athlete who quit basketball at a prestigious private school over bullying from his coach, and a professional who suffered massive repercussions for going public.
“I learned from the research and from watching my own son, that what happens to an athlete if they’re constantly humiliated and treated in a really aggressive and verbally berated way, they stop playing with flow,” said Fraser, who has criss-crossed the continent to give presentations and lectures on the subject.
“They no longer are in the zone, in the moment, (playing with) that creative flow that elite athletes, and professional athletes talk about being key to their success.”
The most common refrain in defence of the hard-edged, keelhaul coaches is their abuse is something that builds resilience in an athlete, pushing them to higher levels of performance, and that today’s athlete is a coddled snowflake compared to previous generations.
And for every complaint about the fire-and-brimstone coach, there is a defender — just as it was with St. Michael’s coach Ian Hyde-Lay, the central figure in Fraser’s son’s case. The year before he was accused of abuse, he was named high school coach of the year by this very publication.
Fraser says that old-world coaching mentality should meet the same fate as other archaic styles of discipline, like corporal punishment — which is now illegal.
“Why we still say that oldschool bullying by coaches is going to be an effective method, when we have extensive research that says, no, it’s going to do nothing but leave lasting scars and damage on children, I’m not sure why we seem to still think it’s an OK response,” she said.
“The research shows that you build athlete resilience by supporting them. Not by humiliating them, publicly embarrassing them, or belittling them. That doesn’t build athlete resilience. That is an outdated model.”
Fraser backed up all of her statements with science, citing studies such as the in-depth one conducted by Bangor University in Wales, that looked at “superelite” athletes. They looked at Olympians, and what the difference was between those who made the Games, and those who left with medals.
“They wanted to find out what was the game-changing thing. It boiled down to one key factor … the coach,” she said. “What they learned was the coaches that get medals not only have all the technical expertise, but they also believe in their athletes.
“They build resilience in their athletes by believing in them. So when their athlete makes a mistake, when they get sick, injured, or they’re struggling with mental health or the pressure they’re under, these coaches nurture them.
“It’s this unwavering men- torship and relationship that gets you an Olympic medal.”
There is a conceit held by many in youth sports and its ancillary industries that only those who are embedded in sport can truly understand they’re not being abusive, but building resilience in athletes the right way. That’s a fallacy, says Fraser, and it desperately needs to change.
“Why do we keep generating this myth where we say a team does well or an athlete does well when they’re being physically or emotionally abused? It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “If an athlete succeeds, it’s in spite of the abuse. And we’ll never know what they could have achieved if they were being mentored and cared for by a proper coach. We’ll never know their potential.
“What we do know is abuse does unbelievable harm to people — especially when it happens in childhood.”