How responsible are athletic coaches for the physical and mental well-being of their players outside the immediate sphere of activity?
It’s a question that has been brought to the fore lately in many different communities, most noticeably Danvers and Woburn. Last week, an independent study concluded that there were definitely lapses in the supervision of the teenage athletes on the part of school officials.
Of course, this report then proceeded to throw an “ill-trained and inexperienced” freshman coach under the bus for the hazing incidents in Woburn, which, to me, defeats the whole purpose of getting to the bottom of these things. Now, the idea isn’t to find someone to blame. The idea is to point out endemic cultures of abuse among young men and women and, you know, fix them!
This will take some work and will also take a whole scale change in the way adults think of the way children must defend themselves. But it needs to be done.
First of all — and this is the silliest, most tiresome trope — the best solution to the systematic abuse children suffer at the hands of bullies is not a punch in the nose. Anyone who still thinks that way has never experienced, or seen, the whole bully/posse/stooge system in action. One punch in the nose doesn’t prevent bullying because there’s an entire network involved in each case.
Second, it shouldn’t have to be up to the victimized child to put up self-defense. Many of these kids are, indeed, picked on because they aren’t aggressive, and because they are easy marks for physical abuse because they’re small, or awkward, or they try a little too hard to fit in. Or they are in some other way “different” from whatever is defined as the “mainstream.”
I would suggest that it’s not just a 23-year-old volunteer assistant football coach at fault here, but rather a system of coaches, teachers and administrators who refuse to recognize the depth of the problem, and therefore have no idea how to solve it.
This problem is not solely prevalent among athletes and athletic teams, of course. In almost every construct, there are kids, and even adults, who are ostracized and picked on. And it’ll persist because there is never any shortage of aggressive kids who have basic insecurities about themselves. When those two extremes mix, look out! And there never seem to be enough kids who are secure about themselves and do not see the need to be outwardly aggressive.
But athletes are the creme de la creme of their schools, for the most part. The rest of the school — even the teachers and administrators — hold them up as ideals. So, the first place we need to look, if we’re ever going to solve this problem, is in the locker rooms, where antisocial conduct is treated as almost a rite of passage. That has to stop.
Locker rooms should never be left unsupervised. Boys or girls who insist on using racially-inflammatory language must be called out by these assistant coaches and reported. The same goes for boys or girls who are outwardly physically confrontational, or whose routinely-abusive language is directed toward one or two teammates or classmates in particular.
I believe that if you stop this nonsense among athletes, you can set an example for the rest of the school.
I also believe that coaches need to be told exactly what they must be doing, and that includes supervising their players so that they don’t target others and pounce on them. Contrary to popular belief, it is not “all in good fun.”
Go ahead. Ask anyone who has ever had rat’s tails given to them, or who has had to listen to the taunting of an entire room of kids how much fun it is.
