So Sue Me!

Coaches who cling to old-school-style coaching techniques may find themselves in court defending their behavior.
by: Jane Musgrave
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WHEN NEWS SURFACED THAT A GEORGIA TECH offensive lineman and his mother wanted criminal charges filed against head coach George O'Leary after the 314-pound player was roughed up in practice, everyone had an opinion.

"This is getting out of hand. Soon we will have to arrest Dale Earnhardt for a hit-and-run accident at the Daytona 500," one Atlanta man wrote in response to a reader survey conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Still others, had a far different view.

"This kind of 'object lesson' is barbaric," another reader wrote. "Do pilot instructors put training pilots in arranged plane wrecks to teach them what it would feel like if they messed up their flight? Do parents throw their kids in front of traffic to teach them what it would feel like to be hit by a car? ... This coach should not be allowed to hide behind his coach status and school sports should not be an excused platform for abusive behavior that would not be tolerated elsewhere. C'mon, some common sense - it's pretty simple."

Or is it?

When does a coach step over the line? Where, in these litigious times, is the line? Is there even a line anymore?

Such are the questions coaches and observers of the game are asking in the wake of the controversy that bubbled up around O'Leary in October. News of the incident broke less than a month after Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight finally got the ax for grabbing yet another student, and just days after former Boston Bruins Mark McSorley was convicted of assault for hitting an opponent with his hockey stick. The timing of the three events fueled suspicions that the sporting world has become a place many coaches don't recognize anymore.

Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, readily admits that few old time coaches would survive in today's world.

"Lord of mercy no," he says. "They would be so far back in jail you'd have to shoot beans at them through a cannon."

Long gone are the days when a coach can make players practice for hours without water. Gone also are the days where a coach can order a player with a broken leg back on the field. But what about a friendly kick in the pants? What about a hard drill, that leaves a player breathless, perhaps even bloody?

"If this [the complaint against O'Leary] could happen today, do I have to look around before I yell at a kid tomorrow?" says Dean Purdy, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University, summing up the kind of questions coaches are rightfully asking.

As a youth football coach and college football referee who has spent much time analyzing the role sports play in society, Purdy says the demands placed on today's coaches are intense and are likely to only get more so.

As the money involved in college athletics has increased, so too has the pressure that is put on coaches to win. But, at the same time coaches are under intense pressure to produce winning teams, players are becoming less willing to obediently follow a coach's orders. And the parents, many of whom believe their son is the next multi-million-dollar NFL superstar? "They'll sue at the drop of a hat," Purdy says.

"It all has serious implications for where team sports are going," he says.

Alan Sack, a former sociology professor who is coordinator of the Management of Sports Industries Program at University of New Haven in Connecticut, says there is no doubt that athletes have changed since the days when he played for Notre Dame legend Ara Parseghian. In those days, brutal drills, like the one that so inflamed Georgia Tech player Dustin Vaitekunas, were an everyday occurrence.

"We're dealing with a different generation of kids," he says. They will no longer do what a coach says simply because he is the coach. Further, if they don't like what the coach did, they - or their parents - may file suit.

"These kids have learned they have rights and they will fight to maintain their dignity," he says.

Coaches, intent on producing a winning team, have to determine whether harsh treatment or tough practices are to make the team better or whether they're just dehumanizing players for the sake of his their ego. "It's not an easy line to draw," he says, particularly in a sport that is inherently violent.

Still, he says, coaches should learn a lesson from what happened to Knight. While he survived, even thrived, for years being bombastic and abusive, he apparently didn't notice that the world had changed around him and his old ways were no longer acceptable. And, judging from his record the last several years, maybe not even productive.

Sack says a coach can gauge the acceptability of his behavior by asking himself a simply question: "Am I doing this to make my team better or am I just falling back on Neanderthal methods that were taught to me years ago by a Neanderthal coach?"

If the answer is "that's the way beloved Coach Jones did it in high school," the coach may want to change his tactics.

Further, he says, coaches should ask themselves whether their behavior is personal, an attempt merely to embarass a certain player, or, whether it's instructional, something that will really make a player better while allowing him to keep his dignity in tact.

Longtime Nebraska defensive coordinator Charlie McBride says he had to learn to draw the line years ago, when he was a young coach.

"When I went into this business I was a wild man," says McBride, who retired last year after 23 years at Nebraska. "I had to learn to control my emotions."

Ultimately, he says, he curbed his behavior when he realized he was losing the players' respect. "I learned how dumb I looked doing it," he says of his tirades. "I could eventually see that some of the kids must have said, 'What a jerk.'"

He says coaches have to learn to pick their targets carefully. Some kids will respond to tough tactics. Some won't. The key is knowing your players well so you can push the buttons that will make each one respond positively.

North Carolina State head coach Chuck Amato agrees. "Every player has a key, you just have to know which way to turn it," he says. "If you know that a kid doesn't respond to screaming or getting in his face, there's no use doing it because it will just demotivate him."

But, he says, what happened at Georgia Tech really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. While Vaitekunas and his mother haven't filed suit, they have hired an attorney and the assumption is that they probably will.

Regardless, Amato says, it's clear the rules are different.

"Everyone knows that things are different in the new millennium," he says. "Even in the '90s, you knew you had to be careful. A lot of people were watching."

While football may still be as brutal as ever, kids have changed, parents have changed, so coaches have to change.

While it might not be simple, as the Georgia writer suggested, it's inescapable. It's the 21st Century.

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