COACHES SET TONE
Gay athletes benefit when leaders foster inclusion, don’t allow slurs
Andrew McIntosh thought about suicide so often as a college athlete that he had his own funeral played out in his head. Dying somehow seemed easier than telling his truth.
“It was emotional chaos,” he tells USA TODAY Sports. “The perception, based on fear, tells you that coming out is worse than death.”
This was in 2009, when McIntosh played lacrosse at Oneonta State in central New York. He remembers the day he heard a teammate utter a homophobic comment — that drill is
so gay — that seemed all the more hurtful for its casual, offhand nature.
Coach Dan Mahar suddenly stopped practice. He told his team, forcefully, that such language was unacceptable. It was a simple act that changed a life. And maybe saved one.
“I was just doing my job,” Mahar says.
It’s a job many coaches do not do, according to Cyd Zeigler, cofounder of Outsports.com. He thinks coaches should be proactive in rooting out homophobic language in locker rooms and on fields of play and that too many coaches tolerate such comments unless they know they have gay or lesbian players on their teams.
“Coaches are the president and CEO of high school sports teams and for a lot of college teams as well,” Zeigler says. “Coaches set the tone. And when they don’t manage behavior, you’re marginalizing closeted and out athletes. Coaches live in this fantasy bubble that it’s just X’s and O’s.”
An international study on homophobia in sports, released this year, found 84% of gay men and 82% of lesbians have heard homophobic comments in locker rooms. The study, titled “Out in the Fields,” surveyed nearly 9,500 men and women from six countries and found a direct correlation between such language and gay and lesbian athletes who choose to hide their sexual orientations.
The study’s stark findings paint sports as anachronistically unwelcoming in an age in which gay men and lesbians are free to marry, suggesting they’re finding more support in the courts than on them.
“If they don’t say anything on it or stop it, they’re condoning it,” Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner says of coaches who let such slurs go by.
Billy Bean, Major League Baseball’s ambassador for inclusion, says the best way to alter the tone is for managers and team executives, all the way up to owners, to set standards.
“Coming from the top down is the only way to change,” Bean says. “It’s about understanding what a workplace is. Calling players a ‘faggot’ while signing an autograph for a bunch of kids, that sets a bad precedent. There are a lot of mistakes made in the moment without thinking about the big picture.”
Bean has been an adviser to David Denson, the minor leaguer who came out last weekend as the first openly gay active player on an MLB-affiliated team. Denson, 20, who plays for the Milwaukee Brewers’ rookie league club in Helena, Mont., told his teammates his secret after he confronted one team- mate in response to a homophobic slur.
Bean had told Denson to take his time and think about all of the ramifications of coming out: “Then he texted me, ‘You’ll never guess what I did today.’ He had told his teammates, because somebody made a comment. He challenged that guy. I think his (teammates) were just being playful. But he let them know that they should be careful what they say. Since then, it’s been an accepting environment.”
Bean, who’s one of two openly gay former MLB players, says changing the culture of clubhouses won’t be easy.
“It’s going to take time and effort from people at the top of every organization,” he says. “The difficulty is there are 30 clubs and only one me at the moment.”
If, as the study suggests, sports have long been a place where such slurs flourish, U.S. women’s national soccer team coach Jill Ellis thinks the dynamic of sports also can provide a solution.
“It brings every different kind of person together, and you have to have a common goal,” she says. “And if you don’t, you’ll fail. As much as it has been a bastion for locker room talk on certain teams, I also think it’s a place where we can break down barriers and forge supportive environments and equality.”
Ellis is the openly lesbian coach of a team that was wildly popular when it won the Women’s World Cup last month with openly lesbian stars such as Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe.
“I’m aware there are many teams in many areas where it’s not a safe environment for a lesbian or gay athlete,” Ellis says. “As a coach, there should be no bias of any kind within the environment. Everybody should feel safe and respected — and it is absolutely a coach’s responsibility to provide that.” TRICKLEDOWN EFFECT Anthony Nicodemo is a rarity in high school athletics as an openly gay boys basketball coach. He understands just how deeply embedded homophobic language is in the sports world; he used to say the same things himself.
“I was the one who was disguising my sexuality for so long,” says Nicodemo, coach of Saunders Trades and Technical in Yonkers, N.Y. “I’d give in to the language. I’d say, ‘Stop being a fairy.’ Or, ‘Don’t be a sissy.’ What better way to disguise it than to use the language yourself ?”
Now he tries to keep his players from saying such things, not always successfully.
“‘That’s gay’ and ‘ no homo’ are extremely prevalent sayings with high school kids,” Nicodemo says. “Even now that I’m openly gay, my kids say it. It’s part of their natural language.
I’ll just give them a stern look. My team has been more careful, but I’ll hear it in the classroom all the time. It’s part of their culture. I try to preach to my kids all the time that saying ‘faggot’ is the same thing as using the n-word.”
Nicodemo knows closeted coaches and says the decision to come out is difficult when you think you could lose your job.
“Two months before I came out, I asked my players how they’d feel if someone on the team came out as gay,” Nicodemo says. “Two kids said, ‘I wouldn’t be able to play with him.’ One of those kids wears a Pride shirt now to support me. He never really interacted with anyone (openly) gay. Once he knew there was no difference, he was cool.”
Nicodemo thinks he knows a formula for eradicating homophobic slurs over time. It starts with educating today’s middle schoolers as the teachers of tomorrow.
“At the end of the day, there’s a trickledown effect,” he says. “You’ve got to start with the educators when they’re kids — stop them from doing it in seventh and eighth grades so it’s not part of their vocabulary when it matters. If you get athletes to change, you can change an entire culture.”
RESPECTFUL ENVIRONMENTS
Steve Fisher, men’s basketball coach at San Diego State, does not allow swearing at practice. (He’s the only one who can, and he puts a penny in a swear jar when he does.) Neither does he allow slurs of any kind, including homophobic slurs.
“We talk on that regularly,” Fisher says. “What it means to be a good teammate and a good person. To be a caring and understanding person. To be someone who accepts other people. … We tell guys to have respect. First for yourself, and then everyone else in the program. We’re not all the same.”
Fisher, 70, says he talked about it in his locker room when Jason Collins and Michael Sam came out. He says he wants to set the stage for the day when one of his players might be ready to do the same.
“We make it clear that’s OK and that we’d be accepting,” he says. “We tell our guys to be open, communicate and be accepting. It’s called allowing people to have rights and not discriminate.”
Fisher dismisses the old military approach of don’t ask, don’t tell and says it is his duty as a leader to promote a healthy atmosphere.
“As coaches, we have a great impact on the people we work with,” he says. “We have an obligation to do more than strategize on how to win games. Do our players know that they have the ability to express themselves? … Having someone be themselves helps us with basketball. But it also sets the stage for understanding in life.”
Amy Wilson, NCAA director of gender inclusion, says the NCAA holds a forum every April that addresses five areas of inclusion, including LGBT issues, and that the NCAA manual calls on coaches and athletics directors to cultivate respectful environments.
“It’s about listening and trying to be proactive,” she says. “We try to foster a dialogue on this.”
‘KIDS ... ARE VERY INFORMED’
Michigan State men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo thinks most coaches would handle it well if they had openly gay players.
“It’s not my job to judge one of my athletes,” he says. “Everybody is different. Some are the partying type, some are the studying type, some are ultra-religious, some might be gay. Put it this way: If you can play ball, that’s all I care about.”
When Sean Conroy of the unaffiliated Sonoma (Calif.) Stompers came out as the first openly gay active pro baseball player, he soon found that the gay slurs he had so often heard began to disappear.
“People think twice about it when they know there’s a gay guy on the team,” he says. “They’ll apologize or say, ‘Sorry, not in that way.’ ”
Griner says homophobic slurs do not happen in the Mercury’s locker room or anywhere in the organization. “I can’t speak for other locker rooms. I know it’s typically more on the men’s side. I mean, it happens with women as well. … If everybody gets together, you can change it.”
University of Massachusetts men’s basketball coach Derek Kellogg coached Derrick Gordon, Division I’s first openly gay men’s player.
“I don’t think we had a huge culture of inappropriate language before Derrick came out, but there’s always going to be locker room talk,” Kellogg says. “After he came out, everyone was very, very conscious of making sure nothing really ugly came out of their mouths.”
Gordon has transferred to Seton Hall, which he called a basketball decision. That’s how his new coach, Kevin Willard, thinks of it, too. Willard says the only criteria considered were whether Gordon could help the team and be a good teammate.
“For us, the fact that he’s gay is an old story,” Willard says. “These kids know about Derrick, they’re on social media and are very informed. This generation of athletes are much more educated on the gay athlete.
“I think the attention is brought on by adults. We make it a bigger deal. Some of these kids can teach us a lesson on how to handle this type of stuff.”
ACCEPTANCE RISING
Mahar still coaches lacrosse at Oneonta State, and McIntosh is one of his assistants. Their story is a powerful illustration of how a coach can change a world.
“When Coach Mahar stopped practice and explicitly told our whole team that type of language wouldn’t be tolerated, I was deeply in the closet,” McIntosh says. “That opened the door for me. I thought, ‘Maybe I can do this.’ ”
McIntosh says it was a key moment in his decision to live — and to leave behind the unbearable burden of a double life.
“There are many pieces to the puzzle,” McIntosh says. “Peer support is just as important. But there’s one person who kind of gets it going, helping you have more identity acceptance. It’s very hard to accept who you are without the acceptance of others. You can’t manufacture it yourself. And in athletics, you almost have tunnel vision. What your team thinks of you matters more than anything.”
Bean thinks a better environment in clubhouses and locker rooms will lead to more acceptance — and to more athletes feeling free to come out. He says in nearly 150 years of big-league baseball there have been two former players who have come out, including himself, but he thinks the first active major leaguer could come out any day.
“It could happen tomorrow,” Bean says. The key, he says, is environment — clubhouses and locker rooms where slurs are discouraged and support is expected.
“There needs to be a movement that permeates throughout the entire environment of sports locker rooms,” Bean says. “Then, overnight, everyone who is closeted could start to come out. The reason most who have chosen not to share their sexual orientation is based on environment. But I think we’re close to moving the baton.”