Source: Romario Roges/Unsplash
In the past few years, the training methods and motivational techniques of such notable athletic coaches as Alberto Salazar—American track coach, former world-class long-distance runner, and head coach of the defunct Nike Oregon Project—have come under increased scrutiny and criticism. It’s about time.
As both a sports psychologist and child and adolescent psychologist, I’ve railed for years against the imbecilic, ill-advised strategy of trying to extract the best performances from athletes by prodding them with shaming barbs about their speed, weight, dedication, coordination, or commitment.
I’ve yet to meet any athlete who played better, ran faster, or threw more accurately as a result of being humiliated by his or her coach. I’ve known plenty of athletes who’ve tried harder when scolded, but that usually doesn’t work out too well for them. All that means is they’re going to choke, having become self-conscious about their performance and concentrating more on not making a mistake than on refining their mechanics—a surefire formula for disaster, disappointment, and disillusionment. Second-guessing their instincts and afraid to take risks, chided athletes back off the more daring plays and avoid making the kinds of quick, independent decisions that win games and competitions.
It reminds me all too well of Katherine Craster’s delightful and spot-on poem, “The Centipede’s Dilemma”:
A centipede was happy—quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
It gets even worse for athletes when they are derided for their body size. In Salazar’s case, several female runners who had been training under him spoke up about the years of manipulation and verbal abuse in the form of public weigh-ins and remarks about being overweight. Salazar instead explains their anguish away as an “unintended” consequence of his admittedly insensitive comments that were meant to “promote athletic performance.”
If you want to help athletes perform their best, you’ve got to help them feel their best. That doesn’t mean showering them with gratuitous praise, but they do need their coaches to respect them.
Those coaches under whom kids and adults perform their best are the ones they like being around, appreciate learning from, love playing for, and in whose company they feel valued. They’re not the coaches who demean them, thinking it will light fires under their butts. Being demeaned doesn’t make people more competitive; it just makes them angry, an unreliable motivator at best.
Besides, athletes at that level don’t need to be motivated; nobody trains or works that hard unless they really want to be there. They come already hungry, already wanting to win. They sacrifice physical comfort, time with loved ones, and hours and hours each day working toward a goal and don’t need to be impelled toward victory. Anyone who believes that belittling, ridiculing, or bullying is necessary for success knows little about sports performance and even less about human psychology.
When I was in my late teens, I competed in horse shows up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I hid from my trainer whenever I ate, fearing his scrutiny over my choice of foods. He never bullied me but he didn’t have to; as a teenager participating in a sport that prized long, lean bodies, I internalized the communal judgment. Hardly an inspiration, my preoccupation with body size was a distraction from what was my otherwise impenetrable focus on training and competing. It was nothing like what Salazar’s runners describe, but I remember feeling as guilty about eating as my fellow barn mate felt about the cigarettes she was sneaking. Her cigarettes! All I was doing was eating lunch.
A version of this post appears in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
