Blog Archives
The Dark Side of College Softball
Like many of you I’m sure, my Facebook feed has recently been filled with photos from Signing Day ceremonies across the country. Congratulations to all those who have officially achieved their dream of becoming a member of a college softball team.
Yet as the classic W.W. Jacobs tale “The Monkey’s Paw” illustrates, getting your wish isn’t necessarily all sunshine and puppy dogs. It can come with a variety of unforeseen consequences that can turn a positive into a negative so it’s important that players and their families enter into this next phase of their careers with their eyes wide open.
Probably the biggest risk factor new college players must understand is that college softball at all levels is a business. Sure, you can probably still find some places where it’s still considered more of an extracurricular activity.
But for the most part being a head softball coach at a college isn’t a sideline or an avocation; it’s someone’s job,. And keeping that job depends on the team performing well, which means the head coach in particular probably isn’t going to have a lot of time for you if you’re not able to help him/her put Ws on the scoreboard.
I recently heard about a highly touted local player who went to play at a Power 5 (P5) conference team – one of those you’ll often see on TV at the Womens College World Series (WCWS). A couple of years ago there was tremendous excitement when she received her offer and signed the paperwork; the future looked rosy indeed.
Fast forward a couple of years and she’s been told she’s no longer on the team and her scholarship has been taken away. Not for doing anything bad or against the rules as I understand it. As far as I know (and I honestly don’t know her personally) she’s a fine, upstanding student athlete and a true team player.
Instead, she was basically shown the door because the coaching staff didn’t feel she was good enough to compete for a starting role and decided to give her spot to someone they thought might do better. If that girl doesn’t, in a couple of years she’ll probably suffer the same fate. That’s just business.
But that’s not the only bad thing that can happen. There have been plenty of stories about college softball coaches who are physically, emotionally, and/or verbally abusive to their players.
I’m not talking about coaches who lose their tempers after a tough loss or throw a clipboard now and then or make their teams run foul poles after sleepwalking through a game they should have won. That can happen even with caring coaches.
No, I’m talking about those who still subscribe to the idea that they need to intimidate and abuse and belittle their players on a constant basis to get them to perform. Then, if anyone complains the coach calls them weak (among other names) and tries to get the rest of the team to ostracize them and drive them out so they don’t have to be accountable for their abuses.
In a time when suicide rates among young females continue to rise according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that sort of approach can have far-reaching affects on young lives. And their families.
Not all of the negatives are so dire, though. One thing that is an eye-opener to many players entering college is how little the coaching staff may actually know about the technical aspects of the game.
It’s easy to assume that someone coaching at a high level has worked hard to gain expertise in skills such as hitting, pitching, throwing, fielding, general human movement, etc., and are constantly looking for new information that can give their players an edge. Yet as many have discovered to their chagrin, that is not always the case.
There appears to be plenty of coaches who figure they learned everything they needed to learn years ago and thus don’t need to keep up with new developments. Old dogs, new tricks, and all.
But that thinking isn’t limited to the old guard. Even young coaches fresh off their playing days can fall prey to it.
They assume that because they were successful they should teach the current crop of players what they were taught, without ever looking to see if that is what they actually did. They repeat the same old cues and use their position of power to force compliance onto the players under their control.
And what happens if that coaching makes the current players worse? Do they look into it and think maybe they should reconsider what they were saying?
Sometimes, perhaps. But more often than not, if a player’s performance or metrics go down, they simply move on to the next player who is performing at the required level. Sad to say, but many a career has been stunted or dashed completely all because of a lack of understanding about A) the core concepts of a particular skill, and B) how an individual’s DNA, body type, conditioning approach, mental approach and more can affect how their body moves in space.
Look, I’m not saying playing college softball has to be a bad experience. To the contrary, I know many, many former players who cherish those years – even some who experienced some level of the issues discussed above.
But it’s important to go into it with complete awareness of the risks that accompany the rewards so you’re more ready to face those challenges.
Like anything else, college softball has its upsides and downsides. If you go into it knowing what the pitfalls can be (rather than viewing it all through the proverbial rose-colored glasses) you’ll stand a much better chance of creating a positive experience – and choosing a program that best matches your personality and playing ability so you spend your four years of eligibility on the field instead of watching from the bench. Or the stands.
Do you really know who’s coaching your child?
Normally I like to keep things focused strictly on topics that relate to the game itself. But this is a subject that really should be of concern to any parent whose kids – male or female – are participating in activities where they have long periods of exposure to adults.
It was sparked by this article, sent to me by my friend Tim Boivin. The article is about the revenge a dad in Pennsylvania was able to extract after one of his daughter’s coaches not only touched her inappropriately (smacked her on the behind, even after being asked to stop) but then tried to smear the dad’s name in the local town. He did it by using his long standing with the league, and the fact that he’d lived there in that town his whole life, to get the dad looked at as an outsider. It’s a pretty good read, and a good lesson about being careful who you mess with, no matter how much power you think you have.
But it also brings up a bigger point. During tryout season, the focus is on making a team. Sometimes it’s the “right” team, and sometimes it’s just any team. But after the stress of tryouts are over and you’re feeling the relief, there’s another question that needs to be asked: how much do I really know about the people who will be coaching my child?
The usual reaction when you find out something terrible about a coach (or other authority figure) is “I had no idea.” Of course you didn’t. Someone who acts like a predator, or a person who will dole out inappropriate physical abuse on players, doesn’t walk around wearing a t-shirt that advertises the fact.
He/she also doesn’t act that way in front of the parents. If he/she did, he/she wouldn’t get access to kids and thus be able to satisfy whatever needs or urges he/she has. Just like a con man trying to convince people to give them money, coaches who want to do terrible things to kids must appear to be completely trustworthy.
Many of them put in the effort to learn the game, too, further helping them hide in plain sight. I remember a guy about 15 years ago who used to contribute regularly to the old eTeamz softball discussion board. His signature phrase was that he would always talk about teaching the FUNdamentals.
The message, of course, being that coaches shouldn’t take themselves too seriously, and remember that it’s a game and games should be fun. Just the kind of person you want coaching your child, right?
Well, one day he just sort of disappeared from the board. Eventually it came out that this guy was arrested, tried, and convicted of several counts of having sexual contact with minors. Now the only FUNdamentals he needs to worry about is watching his back in prison, as many prisoners don’t take too kindly to child molesters.
That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates a point. Not all concerns are around sexual predators, however. For example, would you want a known felon with a history of violence toward women coaching your daughter? Probably not. Or what about someone who had punched a player (or a parent, or an umpire, or an opposing coach) in a fit of anger?
These are all legitimate concerns. Your daughter will be spending a lot of time with the coaching staff in the coming year, especially now that fastpitch softball tends to be a 12-month sport. How can you find out if any of the coaches (not just the head coach) have any skeletons in the closet you should know about?
One way is to ask if the organization does background checks with the state police on everyone who will play a coaching role or be on the bench with the team. If it does, don’t just take their word for it that everything is ok. Ask to the see the reports.
If there’s nothing to hide, they should be more than happy to do it. If they are reluctant to share the information for “privacy” reasons, that could be a red flag. No matter.
You don’t have to be an organization to request a background check on someone. Anyone can do it. If you have any concerns, request it yourself. The cost for a state check is generally $10-$20, while the cost for a nationwide check is typically $25-$45. When you think about what you’re paying to play, it’s worth a few dollars more to gain peace of mind if you have any concerns.
In most cases, the background check is going to turn up clean since it only covers criminal known criminal acts, and despite what the headlines may lead you to believe the people who commit them and get into coaching are rare. Still, there are some out there.
If the organization runs background checks and still allows someone who shouldn’t be there to coach, you might want to re-thing your decision to play for that organization. Clearly they don’t care now. How much are they going to care if you find a problem later and bring it to their attention? It’s obvious that letting that person coach is more important to them than protecting their players.
If the organization doesn’t run the background checks but you do and find something, you should bring it to their attention. Their actions from that point will tell you what you should do. It’s up to you, but if your daughter is going to be coached by someone you don’t want her to be around, and you allow it to happen, you will share in the blame if something happens later on.
Here’s the other thing. As I mentioned, background checks only catch those who have already been caught. You may want to do a background check of your own via Google or another search engine to see if there are comments from past players or parents out there that might give you an indication of the person’s character.
Does this coach have a reputation for being abusive to players, physically, verbally, or emotionally? Is he/she the type of person that will cause excruciating pain to young players despite their screams, as in the story of this cheerleading coach? Will this coach help your young player grow and become the type of person you want her to be, or will he/she teach life lessons you don’t want your daughter to learn?
When you’re with a new team where you don’t know the coaches, one other good idea is to hang around at practices for a while to see how they’re conducted and what the coaches’ approach to interacting with players is. Understand that practices should be hard, and it is not only good but necessary to push players to improve. But there is also a limit to it. They shouldn’t be doing things that are abusive or patently unsafe.
At the same time, understand that you will be going there as a silent observer. It is not your place to offer advice or suggestions, or really do much of anything to interject yourself into the practice unless something truly illegal or inappropriate is occurring. And you’d better have proof.
If you’re told you’re not allowed to watch practice, especially with younger teams, that may be another red flag that something’s not quite right with this team, coaching staff, or organization. As long as you’re silent no one should have a problem with you watching. Heck, it’s probably a good thing, because then you can reinforce what they’re teaching when you work with your daughter on your own.
Again, you hope that none of those bad things are happening. But better safe than sorry. Knowing who is coaching your kids is an important step in ensuring sports/activities participation is a good, positive, and safe experience for your child.
Photo credit: Vetustense Photorogue via Foter.com / CC BY-NC
The “Whiplash” effect on greatness
I know this may be hard to believe for anyone who knows me personally, but apparently I was a little behind in my movie watching because I just saw the movie “Whiplash” on cable. Released in 2014, it was the winner of three Academy Awards 
earlier this year, including one for J.K. Simmons as the brutal band director.
If you’re not familiar with it, here’s a capsule description from IMDB:
A promising young drummer enrolls at a cut-throat music conservatory where his dreams of greatness are mentored by an instructor who will stop at nothing to realize a student’s potential.
And by “stop at nothing” they mean he screams at, berates and humiliates the musicians playing for him without pause, prejudice or mercy. It’s fascinating (although sometimes difficult) to watch, especially Simmons’ performance. Be warned he drops F-bombs the way ET drops Reese’s Pieces – as though he needs them to find his way back to his music stand.
So why am I talking about a movie about a jazz band in a fastpitch softball blog? Because Simmon’s character Fletcher is less like a band director and more like many youth sports coaches we see out on the field. I played in bands through high school and never ran across anyone even remotely like him.
Understand in the movie his methods work. The fictional Shafer Conservatory #1 jazz band is the top jazz band in the country. Not sure if they’d work in the real world, but that’s kind of the point of this post.
At one point Fletcher is talking to the young drummer (Andrew, played by Miles Teller) he browbeat and ultimately threw out of the band when the two run into each other at a jazz club where Fletcher is performing on piano. He explains his methodology essentially by saying no one ever achieved greatness by being told “good job.”
For support he points to a story about jazz great Charlie “Bird” Parker having a cymbal thrown at him during a performance by Jo Jones. (According to IMDB’s trivia section that didn’t actually happen. Jones dropped the cymbal, essentially “gonging” Parker off the stage.) Fletcher then says Parker could’ve quit right there, but instead the incident drove him on to become a great. That’s what Fletcher says he is trying to do for his students – even literally throwing a cymbal at Andrew at one point.
So here’s the question: is Fletcher right? Is the only way to push someone to achieve greatness to abuse them until they either sink or swim? If it’s not the only way, is it the best way? Or even an acceptable way? Can people achieve greatness through encouragement and supportive behavior rather than abuse, or does it hold them back?
Me personally, I don’t believe it requires abuse. Do you need to set high standards? Yes, absolutely. I hate hearing “good job” when something clearly wasn’t. But you don’t have to be abusive to have high standards.
That’s just me, though. What do you think?
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 