in children’s lives are volunteers. Later in competitive sports, coaches are paid by organizations and, like any employee, they are recognized and rewarded as an essential, talented factor in the success of the enterprise.
Coaches move up and down their own ladders of success. At any level, they may be asked to coach on a bigger stage; at a more prestigious high school or college; for the state, province, or country; or in a professional league. Owners and associations determine the coaching hierarchy based on personal and political reasons, as well as on finances and job performance. Their bosses evaluate them, as do the athletes in locker rooms and the parents in the stands.
Although their primary task is to produce winners, many coaches also provide positive support, encouragement, and life lessons, and this means that the athlete-coach relationship is complex. An athlete may love their coaches one moment and hate them the next, and for various reasons, such as ego, puberty, issues at home, or because they were singled out with harsh criticism during practice. One thing is certain, though: all athletes experience conflicted emotions:
“The coach hates me! She thinks I suck!”
“The coach loves me! He thinks I’m the best!”
“The coach doesn’t know how good I could be! Why doesn’t he play me?”
“The coach is a jerk! I hate him!”
“I wish the coach would just give me a break. Why am I getting pushed so hard?”
Parents can further complicate and reinforce these emotions: “Why doesn’t the coach play my kid more?”
Coaches are like an athlete’s boss. Whether qualified in child development or not, they are in charge of shaping the child’s athletic results. Good coaches understand that the child is more than the results. Questionable coaches might produce results, but they might also ignore or verbally, mentally, or physically abuse athletes to get those results. They may pit parents against one another to promote competition, or they might promise unrealistic results.
During my swimming career, I was sworn at by trainers and saw the head-shaking disappointment that others had in me when I didn’t live up to their expectations. I’ve had swimming kickboards thrown at me by coaches, sometimes out of frustration and anger, and sometimes as a curious form of encouragement.
When I was at the University of Michigan, every other year the women’s swim team travelled to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays for a training camp. We left after exams in mid-December and returned the day before school resumed in January. Christmas in Hawaii sounds like a great holiday, but it was a vigorously intense training period where Stu Isaac, our coach, pushed us to go beyond any limitations we could imagine.
On Christmas Day, the whole team was in a foul mood about not being at home with our families. Stu understood this and he pressed us harder—maybe so we would lose our personal emotions to physical pain. He gave each of us a personal challenge, something we hadn’t yet achieved in a workout. That day, I struggled wearily. After talking to my family early in the morning, and with my muscles aching from pure exhaustion and utterly overwhelmed by training six hours a day, I started sobbing. During warm-up, all that saved me from feeling total humiliation was the fact that I was swimming with my face in the water.
Swimmers often talk to themselves as they do laps, staring at the black line on the bottom of the pool. It’s a great problem-solving strategy. I used to rehash the events of the day in my head, or mull over how to resolve a conflict in my life. Sometimes I silently recited notes for an upcoming exam. That day, I directed my internal dialogue at Stu. As I warmed up, I called him all kinds of names and glared at him whenever he was in view. Without the option of quitting or hopping on a plane back home, I gathered my emotions and started the set he had assigned me: a 200-yard backstroke (eight lengths of the pool), times five. I had two minutes and fifteen seconds to complete each set of eight lengths. Until then, my best time ever was just over two minutes, and he expected me to do that five times in a row!
To this day, I remember my times down to the second: The first one I swam 2:10, which meant I had five seconds of rest. The second one, I went 2:11. Four seconds of rest. The third, I let my body take over (no time to feel sorry for myself!) and went a remarkable 2:08. Seven whole seconds of rest. My fourth time was 2:09. Six seconds of rest . . . I could sense the whole team cheering me on to finish the set. I pushed off for the final 200 yards and went 2:06!
When I touched the wall, I was spent.
My limbs shook. I took huge gulps of air.
I half-smiled, because I had done it. But I was also still feeling pissy. As I looked up at Stu to say “I’m done. I did it,” he didn’t congratulate me. Instead, he jumped into the water with all his clothes on and exclaimed, “You did it! If you can do that, you can do anything!”
I wish I could say that I was happy and started laughing, but my immediate thought was “Stu, you are an idiot. Your clothes are wet, and your glasses are sinking toward the bottom of the pool.”
I recognize now more than I did at the time that Stu had given me the confidence to do something that was, in my mind, impossible. He used me as a role model for the team: “If she can do it, so can you . . .” His words shifted the perspective of everyone around me. In this phase of being all-in, we need coaches and mentors who can push us to do things beyond what we think we’re capable of and, importantly, who are worthy of the trust we place in them.
Power Relationships
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