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CNO File Photo – George Starks
The Washington Post
Women’s college
athletes don’t need another coddling parent. They need a coach.
By Sally Jenkins
This week marks a dual commemoration: the 45th anniversary of the
signing of Title IX coincides with the first anniversary of the passing
of Pat Summitt, who turned that law into such an equal rights spear for
women. So it seems right to dwell for a moment on the collective state
of young women athletes on campuses today, to ask whether they are
weaker or stronger than yesterday — and whether Summitt could be the
same kind of force for them in this current snowflakey, iGen safe-space
climate. The truth? She might get herself fired.
The data shows that since Summitt left coaching in 2012, female
athletes have become more anxious, more prone to depression, less adult
and more insecure than ever before. What is up with that?
According to a 2016 NCAA survey, 76 percent of all Division I female
athletes said they would like to go home to their moms and dads more
often, and 64 percent said they communicate with their parents at least
once a day, a number that rises to 73 percent among women’s basketball
players. And nearly a third reported feeling overwhelmed.
Social psychologists say these numbers aren’t surprising but rather
reflect a larger trend in all college students that is attributable at
least in part to a culture of hovering parental-involvement,
participation trophies and constant connectivity via smartphones and
social media, which has not made adolescents more secure and
independent, but less.
Since 2012, there has been a pronounced spike in mental health issues
on campuses, with nearly 58 percent of students reporting anxiety, and
35 percent experiencing depression, according to annual freshmen
surveys and other assessments.
Research psychologist Jean Twenge wrote a forthcoming book pointedly
entitled “IGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less
Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for
Adulthood.” She says that the new generation of students is preoccupied
with safety. “Including what they call ‘emotional safety,’ ” she said.
“Perhaps because they grew up interacting online and through text, they
believe words can incur damage.”
At the same time, accompanying this anxiety, iGens have unrealistic
expectations and exaggerated opinions of themselves. Nearly 60 percent
of high school students say they expect to get a graduate degree — when
just 9 to 10 percent actually will. And 47 percent of Division I
women’s basketball players think it’s at least “somewhat likely” they
will play professional or Olympic ball, but the reality? The WNBA
drafts just 36 players, 0.9 percent.
“If you compare iGen to Gen-Xers or boomers, they are much more likely
to say their abilities are ‘above average,’ ” Twenge said.
This combination of dissonant factors is creating an increasingly tense
relationship between overconfident yet anxious players, and coaches who
bring them down to earth. In women’s sports especially, there has been
an ugly surge in complaints of “verbal abuse,” with investigations at
more than a dozen programs between 2010 and 2016. In some cases,
coaches were relieved for legitimate cause. But in others, decorated
coaches were suspended, were fired or resigned even though there was no
evidence of mistreatment. At Nebraska, Connie Yori was the 2010 coach
of the year and took the Cornhuskers to a Big 12 regular season title,
a Big Ten tournament title and seven NCAA tournaments in 14 years,
before she quit last season in the wake of complaints that she was
“overly critical” of players and made them weigh themselves.
Something more is going on here than a new awareness of bullying, and
rebellion against fossilized methods.
Talk to coaches, and they will tell you they believe their players are
harder to teach, and to reach, and that disciplining is beginning to
feel professionally dangerous. Not even U-Conn.’s virtuoso coach, Geno
Auriemma, is immune to this feeling, about which he delivered a
soliloquy at the Final Four.
“Recruiting enthusiastic kids is harder than it’s ever been,” he said.
“. . . They haven’t even figured out which foot to use as a pivot foot
and they’re going to act like they’re really good players. You see it
all the time.”
Coaches are so concerned about this that at the annual Women’s
Basketball Coaches Association spring meeting they brought in no fewer
than three speakers to address it. Youth-motivator Tim Elmore lectured
on “Understanding Generation iY.” And a pair of doctors discussed
“Promoting Mental Health Strategies and Awareness.”
It doesn’t take a social psychologist to perceive that at least some of
today’s coach-player strain results from the misunderstanding of what
the job of a coach is, and how it’s different from that of a parent.
This is a distinction that admittedly can get murky. The coach-player
relationship has odd complexities and semi-intimacies, yet a critical
distance too. It’s not like any other bond or power structure. Parents
may seek to smooth a path, but coaches have to point out the hard road
to be traversed, and it’s not their job to find the shortcuts. Coaches
can’t afford to feel sorry for players; they are there to stop them
from feeling sorry for themselves.
Coaches are not substitute parents; they’re the people parents send
their children to for a strange alchemical balance of toughening yet
safekeeping, dream facilitating yet discipline and reality check. The
vast majority of what a coach teaches is not how to succeed but how to
shoulder unwanted responsibility and deal with unfairness and
diminished role playing, because without those acceptances success is
impossible.
Players can let that demoralize them — or shape them into someone
stronger. The choice is ultimately theirs, not the coach’s. And that’s
the thing most people miss about coaches: how strangely powerful yet
powerless they ultimately are, how beholden they are to the aspirations
and frailties of other people’s children. It’s a beautiful, terrible
relationship that can tilt all too easily, and usually tilts hard, into
undying loyalty or lifelong hard feelings.
The bottom line is that coaches have a truly delicate job ahead of them
with iGens. They must find a way to establish themselves as firm allies
of players who are more easily wounded than ever before yet demand they
earn praise through genuine accomplishment.
Based on what I knew of Pat and her intuitive dealings with vulnerable
players such as Chamique Holdsclaw, who has become a powerful campus
mental health advocate, she probably would have found a way to work
with and build up iGens, just as she did boomers, Gen Xers and
millennials. But it would not have been an easy adaptation.
Believe it or not, for most of Summitt’s 1,098-victory career at
Tennessee, what she really taught was how to deal with fear and
failing. In the 21 years I knew her, only three times did she win
championships. All the rest of those seasons ended in some kind of
failure.
Much as she loved to see her players win, what she was really
interested in was “how they respond,” she said. She said time and again
that what she really was trying to do was convert girls into strong,
independent women. It was an inevitably painful undertaking.
“If everyone loved it all the time,” she said, “that meant we were
doing something wrong.”
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