Four months. Over 23 games. Somewhere between 50 and 100 practices. That’s how long it took for Rutgers University to fire Men’s Basketball Head Coach Mike Rice after learning of Rice’s abusive behavior towards his players.
In Dec. 2012, the university discovered video footage showing Rice abusing his players, resulting in Rice’s three-game suspension and a $50,000 fine. Rutgers Athletic Director Tim Pernetti announced that Rice would also be attending anger management classes. On April 2, 2013, ESPN aired the same video footage. One day later, Rice was fired.
The clips showed Rice shoving, grabbing, verbally abusing and throwing basketballs at Rutgers basketball players during practices. The verbal abuse revealed offensive language such as homophobic slurs.
To many, Rice’s coaching strategies crossed the line. However, there are often situations in which that line between intense coaching and abuse is harder to draw.
“It can be difficult to motivate players today,” said Guilford College Head Women’s Basketball Coach Stephanie Flamini in an email interview.
Flamini and Guilford Athletic Director and Head Men’s Basketball Coach Tom Palombo try to find more positive ways to motivate the athletes they coach.
“It helps that we have won two ODAC championships, and they have gotten to experience the sense of accomplishment and self-pride,” Flamini said. “So, we draw on that.”
“The days of Bobby Knight and all that are gone,” Palombo said. “You have to get to know your players and what motivates them.”
Abusive coaching practices that use tactics like shaming can have lasting negative effects on young athletes.
“Producing cognitive, emotional and physical effects, shame changes the neural circuits of the brain,” reported Psychology Today. “These neural changes can hold a young person in a state of both active defense (ready to fight) and helplessness.”
Senior Richard Rogers, a member of Guilford’s track and field team, grew up dealing with different aspects of sports.
“If you show fear, if you cry, if you don’t like getting hit or hurt, they say that you’re a wuss — ‘don’t be a girl, suck it up, be a man,’” Rogers said. “Growing up with that … as an athlete, you kind of put that on yourself.
“You make yourself feel awful about it, because they are degrading you to a point where you have to force yourself to take that extra step, so that it will stop and you will start getting respect.”
Some players on the Rutgers men’s basketball team have said that they did not consider Rice’s behavior to be abusive. Rutgers junior and basketball player Wally Judge, who transferred in from Kansas State, did not find Rice’s language to be “inappropriate” and overall thought that practices at Kansas State were tougher, reported ESPN. Other players also felt that Rice did not cross the line.
However, Judge’s statement — that practices at Kansas State were harder than those at Rutgers — does raise questions about how common this kind of treatment of student athletes really is, and how often it gets swept under the rug or goes unchanged.
“I’ve had many coaches who thought that kind of a route was necessary,” Rogers said.
He recalled a Pop Warner football practice where one player had knocked out another’s tooth.
“(The coach) had the kid’s tooth in his hand, and he was showing it to the team, like, ‘If you don’t give into pain, if you don’t care that your tooth is knocked out, or that you break your bones, and you still play, then you are worthy of being on this field,” Rogers said. Rogers and his team members were nine and 10 years old at the time.
Some hope that the number of scandals involving abuses of power by athletics coaches in educational institutions will bring a closer look at the pressure put on young athletes.
“This isn’t the military,” Rogers said. “This is sports. This is entertainment. This isn’t a life-or-death situation.”
