When the gym, the court, the field, and the pool become places of terror.
This post is part four in a series on the struggles of recovering athletes.
I’ve been writing a series of posts on the struggles of recovering athletes who endured intense training regimes throughout their youth, and who continue to grapple with the damage done to their sense of self, their self-worth, and their autonomy far into their retirement years.
Many of these athletes lived their childhoods and young adulthoods in sports cultures in which they were allowed little to no expression of thought, emotion, or choice. They were expected to absorb the coach’s insults, acts of public humiliation, and threats, follow orders without question or complaint, and do it all with a show of gratitude. When in pain, dealing with exhaustion, or in fear of danger, they were to suck it up, push it down, and ignore it.
As I discussed in an earlier post, athletes were typically treated as performing bodies — means to an end in the service of wins, records, medals, and the coach’s reputation — not as human beings endowed with their own capabilities of reason and freedom. Their own abilities to deliberate and make choices about their own safety, well-being, personal boundaries, values, and goals were denied and suppressed. Head coaches had absolute authority, and they ruled by instilling fear in athletes (as well as parents and assistant coaches), and retaliated against those who disobeyed, resisted, or questioned them.
I want to pause and dig into this authoritarian coaching model of seizing control over the lives of young people by creating an environment of fear, as this has turned out to be such a consistent theme in recovering athletes’ stories that it has emerged as a kind of playbook, used across sports, across different levels (from intermediate to elite), and across countries.
The Authoritarian’s Playbook of Fear
First of all, “fear” is really too soft of a term to describe what many athletes experienced daily during their childhoods and young adulthoods in sports. These athletes were terrified — a term I consistently heard in our conversations. They described living in fight/flight/freeze mode whenever they were around their coaches. They felt unsafe and out of control, knowing they had no choice over what might happen that day in the gym.
Even outside the gym, athletes described spending their days in a state of dread, unable to concentrate at school, unable to sleep, afraid to eat lunch out of worry that they’d gain a single pound, and sometimes even wishing something terrible might happen (like a car accident) that would keep them from having to face whatever was about to happen at practice.
One athlete described her experience going to the gym each day as a “hostage situation.” One by one, the coach would order members of her team to throw dangerous acrobatic skills they weren’t yet confident to do, under the threat of various punishments. One by one, each athlete would, in a state of distress and tears, try and fall or stand frozen and unable to move — too afraid to attempt the skill. The whole team would receive increasing punishments — push-ups, rope climbs, laps around the parking lot until collapse, restriction of water or bathroom use — as each team member failed to meet the coach’s demands.
Athletes often describe the fear they experienced in sports as being two-fold. They feared, first, the danger of the physical actions they were expected to perform (which might involve, for instance, flipping backward in the air with the risk of landing on their head, having balls hurled at their face, or being in combat situations with an opponent). And, second, they feared the coach (for reasons outlined above). Many athletes described a kind of gaslighting that went on in their sport in which the first kind of fear was totally invalidated by coaches – as if there was nothing intrinsically dangerous, scary, or difficult about the sport. If you felt fear, you were seen as a coward, a baby, a wuss, or a headcase. You were ordered to get over it or get out.
Even long after retirement, athletes expressed their utter confusion about why their past coaches would never recognize that danger was a “real thing” in their sport, and that it was perfectly rational for athletes to notice danger while entering into potentially harmful situations and watching plenty of their teammates or competitors get hurt. Fear was a normal and understandable part of facing physical danger in sports, yet it was treated as unusual, impossible to work with, and invalidated by their coaches.
Athletes often wondered out loud in our discussions why coaches wouldn’t just own up to the dangers of the sport, recognize them, and help kids build confidence by offering strategies for working through their fears – like with safe drills that advance step by step — rather than yelling at kids for their fear, and making them even more scared and paralyzed. All that did was cause practice to come to a dysfunctional standstill. Why was their reaction to fear to cause more fear by using intimidation and punishment?
The Belief That Fearing the Coach Is Necessary for Success
I wondered along with them about this puzzle, which I had also experienced as an athlete, until one day I heard the answer out of the mouth of a coach, as if it were some sacred formula or “best practice” that coaches passed down to each other: “You have to make the athlete more afraid of the coach than the skill.” That’s how you successfully control an athlete, remove all resistance, get them to take bigger risks, and efficiently extract the physical performance you want.
After I had heard this formula once, I started to recognize it more frequently in the casual talk and interviews with folks from the sports world. The belief, plainly, is that doubling down on the athlete’s fear (rather than reducing it), and re-directing it toward the coach, is “necessary” for creating champions. It is only through the cultivation of fear — intimidation, harassment, threats, and punishment — that you come to dominate human beings and get the performance you want out of them. You have to “force” it out of them. This worldview was discussed unabashedly, straight-faced, without any awareness of its moral ramifications or its effects on athletes.
The belief that cultivating an overwhelming fear of the coach is necessary for success is central to the authoritarian’s “win at all costs” playbook. It’s a method for gaining power, reducing the human freedoms of athletes, and suppressing the expression of thought, emotion, and physical pain (any potential resistance to the coach’s demands) to get results that reinforce the coach’s agenda. When I heard coaches talk about it, I felt like I was listening to “leadership” advice from Machiavelli himself.
Making the athlete more afraid of the coach than the dangers of the sport — i.e., manipulating a human being into a state of terror to forcibly extract a movement from their body — is not a coaching “best practice,” it’s an abuse of power. It is a violation of the athlete’s autonomy, it ignores the importance of their input and consent, it is dehumanizing, and I have now listened to a long train of stories about how it does short and long-term harm to the person, to their mental and physical health, and to their relationships. Furthermore, adding to an athlete’s fear does not help their performance. It leads to greater paralysis, more difficulty in syncing mind and body, more injuries, more burnout, more difficulties with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation.
Athletes’ voices are rarely heard on these issues. They aren’t allowed to speak about the effects of the system on their lives while they are in their sport, and after retirement, they often try to get as far away from it all as possible to heal. Coaches and parents who perpetuate the system rarely learn about the problems, which conveniently allows them to be reproduced without opposition, from one generation to the next.
In part five of this blog series, we’ll dig further into the damage done to athletes who endured the authoritarian model. It’s time we listen to their voices and examine the patterns that emerge.
Resources
“British Gymnastics: Claims athletes ‘beaten into submission’ amid ‘culture of fear’” (Sky News, 2020)
“Abuse is widely accepted as part of organized sports culture but it should not be tolerated” (The Conversation, 2022)
“End Game: Breaking the Silence” (Documentary from YUZU Productions, 2020)
