THE ATHLETE AND THE COACH
It doesn't take a genius to know that in sports, for every winner there is at least one loser. In track and field, gymnastics, swimming, and other sports where more than two teams compete together; there is one winner and several losers. And if a particular team is expected to win a championship, its members can be considered losers, even with a winning record, if they fall short of their championship goal. (The coaching "graveyard" is full of those who earned winning records but not enough championships.)
How much pressure to win each coach feels, depends in large part upon the sport and past performance at the college. Obviously there is more pressure to produce a national championship football team at Notre Dame than a winning golf team at Hacker Tech. But to different degrees, most coaches feel some pressure to win, whether the pressure comes from others or is self-imposed. These two factors that coaches are expected to win, yet everyone cannot win help to explain why few coaches keep the same job, or even stay in the profession of coaching, for very many years. Those who lose consistently usually are fired or quit; those who win and are ambitious (as coaches tend to be) move on to bigger challenges.
No matters how good a strategist, how well organized, or how deft a psychologist, a coach will not win consistently without good athletes. But many coaches feel that having good athletes (resulting from luck or recruiting effort) is not even enough to help them become and stay winners. They also need commitment to the sport from their athletes. Some coaches simply ask their athletes for this commitment, others demand it. What does this commitment mean to you as a student-athlete?
The Time Problem: Commitment to athletics is most apparent in terms of time and energy devoted to training and to the team. As an athlete, you can expect to spend 25 to 50 or more hours each week in your sport. Coaches generally expect the hours required for team-related tasks (practices, travel, games, conditioning, chalk-talks, etc.) to be taken from your leisure time, which they often consider a low priority. This is part of the price athletes are supposed to pay for the privilege of playing for the college. But everybody wants and needs a certain amount of leisure and personal time. Since no one has yet found more than 24 hours in a day, college athletes often have to steal the time required for team-related tasks from somewhere else. Instead of sacrificing their leisure time, that "somewhere else" is often schoolwork or sleep.
Jeff Hembrough, a tackle on the Illinois State University football team who majored in chemistry, was honored in 1981 by the Football Foundation and Hall of Fame as an All-America Scholar-Athlete. Hembrough describes the time problem facing most college athletes:
Time is a problem for student-athletes regardless of whether they are poor students or good ones, starting players or reserves. There is not enough time to do everything that you want to do. To get the most that you possibly can out of your time takes planning and discipline, skills that you should be developing in your sport.
Winning vs. Your Welfare: Coaches feel that the time commitment they demand of athletes is necessary in order to have a winning team. Most coaches are also genuinely concerned about the personal and academic welfare of their athletes. Unfortunately, when the welfare of their athletes conflicts with the chance to win, there are too many coaches who will sacrifice the former for the latter. Try not to get into that situation by carefully selecting your college and coach. But if you find yourself working with a coach for whom your personal welfare is little more than an afterthought, and especially if your academic progress or health is suffering because of the coach's demands, you should seriously consider either transferring to another school or quitting the team. Those are drastic measures, but the consequences of staying in a bad environment and wasting your education are worse. Without question, it is a tough decision to make, but one that you should not avoid.
What Do You Want from Your Coach? Athletes learn early to figure out what their coach wants from them but seldom try to determine, beyond the obvious, what they want and should get from the coach. First, all athletes want the coach to allow them to compete. Next, they want the coach to teach new techniques and strategies and correct their faults. But, in addition, a college coach should be a good counselor and guide, rather than a dictator or guardian figure who takes care of everything. "Taking care of everything" usually means taking most of your choices away from you (even in the selection of classes, who you'll live with, where you'll get a part-time or summer job, and similar decisions). Having someone make decisions for you is not what college is supposed to be about; it encourages dependence, which can cripple you when you have to act on your own. Yet, some coaches totally control their athletes in order to better serve the team's needs, at the expense of each athlete's growth. You will gain more from a coach who gives you freedom to make your own decisions.
Dealing with the Coach's Personality: You may like your coach's personality or you may hate it, but you have to deal with it if you want to be allowed to compete. As any athlete knows all too well, the coach holds power over one of the most important concern in your life: your access to competing. If you are not being given a fair chance to compete, an otherwise good relationship is likely to become strained.
Since coaches have ultimate power over who gets to compete, dealing with their personalities generally means adjusting to them rather than having them adjust to you. Some coaches-"Bear" Bryant was the best-known example-are unemotional and distant from their athletes. Others, like Joe Paterno, project a warm and parent-like or even a buddy image to their athletes. Still others present themselves as antagonists, always seeming to dig at their athletes, criticizing and harping on the most minor errors, and keeping everyone on edge. Each has a different coaching style.
Whichever face your coach wears, it is probably one that he or she feels will work most effectively to produce a successful team. The "coaching face" the way coaches treat and interact with their athletes is usually a means for motivating and controlling athletes. It may be very different from the way they relate to family and friends. Former athletes often see their coaches in a completely different light after their days of college competition end. They find out that the coach was more of a complete person than he or she dared let on to student-athletes.
Many coaches either can't or won't treat each of their athletes as individuals with different needs. If you don't like the way your coach is treating you, it is your responsibility to do something about it. If you think that your coach has the wrong image of you, your choice is either to suffer along with the old image or to take the initiative to correct that image and establish a new relationship with the coach. Don't expect the coach to take the lead; he or she has a lot of athletes to deal with.
Changing the way we relate to people is not easy. But don't mistakenly believe that the way you've related to coaches or teammates in the past is the way you must continue to act. You always have freedom to change your image; the burden is on you to exercise that freedom, especially if that image is not the way you want it to be. If, for example, you have become the team clown but want to be taken more seriously, it is up to you to change that image. Since the coach often influences what roles people play on their team, let the coach know that you would prefer to be taken more seriously. If you want more responsibility, ask for it and act more responsibly.
Coaches will often respond very well to this kind of direct approach from their athletes. It generates respect as a mature way of dealing with a conflict between two people-such as coach and athlete-who have to work closely together. Some coaches, on the other hand, will react poorly to an athlete who tries to correct the coach's mistaken image and establish a better relationship. Trying to improve the coach's image of you may seem like a gamble, but in the long run it will be worth the risk. You can be sure that it's better than spending a few years not getting along with the coach, hanging onto the futile hope that something will change the situation for you. That something often takes the form of a dream on the athlete's part that a chance will come to win a big contest for the coach. The chance of that happening is not likely when the coach and athlete don't get along.
THE ATHLETE AND BOOSTERS
Who are college athletic boosters? Most people assume that athletic boosters are alumni of the college and, conversely, that all alumni are athletic boosters. In reality, many graduates of a college do not actively support the school's teams. Many do not even like sports. On the other hand, many athletic boosters are simply fans who have affiliated themselves with a particular college, even though they have never taken a class at the school whose teams they support. Their interest in the college lies in having a team to root for.
Boosters invariably appear to athletes as friends, even though they sometimes do more harm to athletes and entire athletic programs than an enemy ever could. The recent probations suffered by the UCLA, Arizona State, and Clemson football teams each resulted from over-zealous booster involvement. Harm to athletes and programs occur because boosters want so badly for the athletic program to be successful. Many boosters feel that athletic success is worth any price. Yet they often seem ignorant of (or unwilling to accept) the fact that tactics which may have led to success in their own businesses and professions are either inappropriate or illegal in college athletics.
QUESTION: Why are athletic boosters interested in you?
ANSWER: Because of your athletic ability and, in particular, what you can do for the team.
QUESTION: What can you do for the team if you suffer a disabling injury or after you use up your playing eligibility?
ANSWER: Nothing!
QUESTION: What interest are boosters likely to have in you if you become injured or after your college athletic career is finished?
ANSWER: Considerably less than when you were an active member of the team. You probably weren't the first athlete they befriended and you won't be the last. There is always someone new coming along on whom boosters can lavish their attention, money, and advice.
Be friendly with athletic boosters, especially if they are friendly to you. But also be wary of them. The history of college sports is filled with incidents where something has gone wrong in the relationship among athletes, athletic teams, and boosters. The problem usually arises when boosters want to help too much, and so offer more to individual athletes than the rules allow. Not long ago, the University of San Francisco decided to drop its entire men's intercollegiate basketball program because of excessive booster involvement. The college's administrators stated that they would only reinstate the team when they felt confident that they could control boosters.
What sort of help do boosters frequently attempt to make available to athletes? The following are typical:
Money, from pocket change to thousands of dollars or use of credit cards (Even the pocket change is illegal)
Gifts, ranging from "a little something from the store" to cars, trips, and even houses (All gifts to athletes are illegal, except gifts from family)
Advice, from game strategy to opinions about majors and careers (There are better places to get advice than from boosters)
Contacts with people who can help athletes get started in careers once their college days end (Career contacts are important, the best legitimate benefit that boosters can offer you)
Clearly, some athletes don't care about getting an education and willingly sell themselves to the highest bidder. Also, many coaches are only interested in building a winning team any way they can. Even college presidents have been known to look the other way when rules have been broken, and some welcome the involvement and largesse of wealthy boosters. But without the boosters' intense interest in being associated with winning athletic teams, many of the temptations some student-athletes have to face-Should I take the money? Am I a fool if I don't take it?-would not exist.
Many large-scale college athletic programs operate on money donated by boosters. This money pays for scholarships and coaching salaries at a number of large colleges. Donations from athletic boosters to the Stanford University athletic program reached $4-million in the 1980-81 year alone. Clemson's boosters gave $3.1-million, Florida State's $2.1-million, Texas A&M's $1.8-million, University of Missouri's $1.5-million, Purdue's $1-million. These are only a few examples of athletic programs that are among those most heavily funded by boosters' money. The average NCAA Division I college counts on over $300,000 each year from boosters to support its athletic programs. And even many small colleges cultivate booster involvement in sports. In fact, budgets tend to be so tight at some small schools that intercollegiate athletics programs might not exist without boosters' donations.
Most boosters mean well for their schools and athletes. The problem lies with those who fail to understand the difficult (and potentially damaging) position in which they are putting athletes by offering them illegal bonuses. Boosters may not want to consider the ethical problems they create for you. Having their team win may be, to them, considerably more important than following the rules. Besides, the rules and penalties apply to you, the athlete, not to them. They have nothing to lose; it's you and your team who will pay the price.
