ThreeSixty -

By Paris Porter

Genesis McCoy, a junior at Roseville Area High School, has learned a lot from her track and basketball coaches. “A good coach sets the tone and expectations from the start,” she says. “They point out things and say you’re not going to be doing those things or you will not play on this team.”

Other lessons are not so positive. Listen to ESPN for long and you’ll hear the commentators blaming coaches – including elite high school coaches – for teaching top young athletes the wrong lessons. Those millionaire athletes who are flashy and arrogant show bad examples of sportsmanship and take the attention away from the team effort, they complain.

Athletes and commentators agree that high school coaches have tremendous influence on their players and that the lessons they teach can go way beyond the sport.

Dr. Doug Hartmann, a sociologist of sports at the University of Minnesota, says high school is when players start developing certain traits and attitudes about their sports and that coaches help shape them.

“I don’t know if they’re different from a lot of other teachers,” Hartmann said. But coaches’ influence is strong because young people care about sports, want to do well and because it’s an intense physical and emotional experience.

“High school is the most important time of an athlete’s sports career and is even more so for athletes who are good enough to play on the college or professional level,” he said. The quality of the coach has a big influence on whether students have a good experience with a sport, he said.

Coaching for life

Ronald Williams, 17- year- old senior who plays football and basketball at Highland Park High School in St. Paul, believes there’s more to coaching than teaching the game or motivating players to play.

A good coach “cares about more than just winning but is concerned about players’ problems,” he said. “When working with teens you need to be able to reach them mentally, because if a player is having problems outside of their sport and the coach can’t or won’t try to help them then the coach has failed.”

Dave Zeitchick, a history teacher and football coach at Highland Park, says the sport taught him life lessons that he tries to pass on to his players. “Football is the vehicle I use to try to teach kids about life because football saved me. I grew up in a (bad) environment when I young. A football coach grabbed me and put me on the football filed and that team became my family.”

Few surveys have tried to measure coaches’ influence. A 1989 report involving 250 surveys from athletes at one high school found that 92 percent of them had a good to excellent experiences and learned about everything from study habits to setting personal goals from their coaches.

That survey also identified problems. One in four students said they were overly afraid of making a mistake in practice and 43 percent feared making mistakes in games. And one in five felt they had been unfairly disciplined by the coach at least once.

Lack of discipline sometimes a problem

McCoy remembers seeing a terrible failure of discipline her freshman year. “Half of the boys’ varsity basketball team was caught drinking one night before a game by their coach. The way he punished the players who were drinking is making them sit out of the game for the first half. By just benching them for a half, you’re telling the player that drinking is not really a big deal and it is,” she said.

Hartmann thinks it’s unrealistic to expect that coaches will always be great role models. “They’re humans. Some of them can be role models. Some of them can be really bad.”

Vontez Donady, 17- year- old senior and football player at Highland Park, has had coaches who didn’t teach the game’s skills well.

“A bad coach won’t prepare you for the right situation,” he said. “Back in 8th grade in a traveling league game my team got blew out because all week in practices we were not preparing for what the other team was going to throw at us. And in the game it showed.”

Emphasis on games limits skill development

Chris Callan, a specialist for Program Impact – a teen program at the St. Paul YWCA, used to coach junior high basketball. He believes young athletes are playing too many games and that the other areas of skill development suffer.

“At that age you can get caught up in playing game after game, and you really don’t have time to work on your fundamentals. I think that’s why you see a huge lack of fundamentals with high school, college and pro athletes.”

Callan believes that having a good attitude and developing good habits starts at before high school. “Sixth to eighth grade is a crucial time for athletes to learn how the team game is played. If you’re always thinking about yourself, it’s going to be hard to break that habit,” said Callan.

Coaches blame media

While some sports analysts blame coaches for spoiled athletes, many coaches blame the media.

“What they see on TV is T.O.’s touchdown dance in the end zone ‘Look at me. Look at me,’” Zeitchick says. “And then it gets flashed on ESPN 500 times a day — a bunch of professional athletes who are trying to draw the spotlight on themselves.”

Mike Grant, long-time head football coach at Eden Prairie High School, agrees. Because of such coverage, younger athletes “think this is the thing to do” and copy their actions, he said.

Hartmann thinks there’s too much pressure on professional athletes to market their league and impress viewers.

“Part of the responsibility for pro athletes is to entertain, to win and to draw large crowds and TV ratings. What that requires is not always being good role models. We put a double standard on athletes and a lot of the expectations on star athletes. Like on one hand we want them to do crazy things and celebrate and be flamboyant and on the other hand we want them to talk to kids about how important school is.”