The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Coaches making new connections with young players
I’d won the mile at a highschool track meet. While catching my breath, I heard a distant person calling, “Chris! When you cut inside that guy near the finish, you left the track. They could have disqualified you. Be careful!”
I recognized the high-energy, German-accented voice — my previous coach. Why was he at the meet? Then he approached, his face expressive as he repeated the admonition. A few quick words, a slap on the back, and off he went — not much to it.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, I hardly ever saw coaches go out of their way to provide athletes guidance. Nowadays, the incident seems like a forerunner of modern interplay.
The role of trust in coach/ student-athlete relations
A team of research psychologists studied the coach/athlete relationship, indicating that it’s largely the result of two factors — the effectiveness of the participants’ connection and the level of success. Many of these relationships formed when the competitors were studentathletes.
A celebrated example featured the swimmer Michael Phelps and his coach Bob Bowman. Their partnership thrived for two decades during which Phelps became the most successful Olympian ever, winning 28 medals, 23 of them gold.
Shortly before his final Olympics, Phelps stressed complete confidence in the effectiveness of their relationship, saying, “I’ve trusted that man since I was 11 years old, and it’s not going to stop today.” He was equally assured about their upcoming success, never doubting Bowman had a “plan to figure out what we’re going to do to move forward.” The result — four gold medals and one silver.
Throughout my youth, these factors often combined differently — team success but coach/student-athlete relations largely undeveloped. Our college soccer coach spent three years with us during which we won nearly 80 percent of our games, but his connection with players was distinctly limited.
He was a good fit for that nuts-and-bolts era, effectively running drills and scrimmages in preparation for competition — a pleasant, friendly man but like most of his colleagues seldom relating to players beyond game-associated concerns. That could prove problematic.
Late in my junior year, we faced a team which didn’t impress our coach. “Lots of substitutions,” he declared, grinning as we took the field. We believed him, clearly happy and relaxed, but overall played sloppily and lost badly.
Nowadays, the landscape has been changing, with growing emphasis on developing trust to help solidify relationships between coaches and studentathletes. A prominent specialist writing about the topic focused on a couple of points.
He suggested that these competitors “thrive on trust,” with coaches’ support providing both security and confidence. The writer declared that without trust, most coaches aren’t influential enough to motivate modern youths “to up their game and stretch their physical abilities.”
Not surprisingly, he found that high-performance coaches tended to focus on athletes individually, nurturing positive relationships. Approaches can be “as simple as asking about a student’s pet or a shared interest in a TV show.” The following issue illustrates the impact of trust.
A special case involving coaches and student-athletes
Nationwide data from 2020 revealed that 54 percent of American children aged 6-17 participated in organized sports, with low-income and racial-minority youths less involved than whites. The onset of the pandemic and the additional hardship it brought has probably expanded those margins.
Black students’ participation in organized sports is the lowest of the major racial groups, with community-oriented service initiatives often recognizing that African American coaches can provide muchneeded assistance for their group’s athletes. Recently several instructors in a racially diverse national program commented on why relationships are likely to thrive when both coaches and student-athletes are Black.
A coach in Harlem explained that when young players encounter “a trusted adult in their life … [who] can play/ coach the game they both love, it’s always a plus.” He’d had a Black coach, who treated him and other Black players like they were his sons, and it impressed him, influencing the person he’d become and “leaving me truly thankful that my first lacrosse coach was an African American man.” Now it was his turn to emulate that role model with his own Black athletes — that “this is why representation in coaching matters.”
Notably, there are few Black women in coaching, disadvantaging Black female athletes compared to their male counterparts. Reviewing the situation, a journalist concluded that it’s “crucial” to attack the persistent shortage.
We older witnesses have observed vast changes in student-athlete/coach relations, now finding ourselves living in an era where the issue receives extensive attention and support.
The process keeps rolling on, occasionally providing tantalizing glimmers of what might unfold in upcoming years.