Seen the Rutgers tape? Whats your opinion on abusive coaches?

The Game Room
1

I played high school and a couple years of college basketball. There’s not much on that tape that I haven’t heard about from friends that played. I never played under that kind of abuse but all coaches are hard asses. Sports is organized violence. You got to be tough minded and determined to play sports. You don’t go running home to momma when some guy elbows you going up for a shot. You suck it up and find a way to guard that S.O.B. no matter what. Take your licks and beat his ass within the rules of the game.

If a grown ass man can’t handle having some basketballs thrown at him should he even be playing? Somebody calls him a faggot and his precious feelings are hurt? The coach is trying to instill some toughness in that team. Especially mental toughness. Call me a faggot? I’ll go out there and show you some balls by the way I play. At least that’s the reaction the coach is hoping for.

My biggest issue with the Rutgers coach is… He was out of control. This wasn’t a coach trying to motivate and toughen up the players. This guy was freaking going postal out there. Control is a big part of sports. You have to always be thinking and reacting to the game. It’s part of the mental toughness that I referred to earlier. You don’t get mad and get kicked out of a game. You find a way to beat another player by the way you play. Not by freaking out.

I support firing this jerk. But, don’t expect every coach to kiss his player’s asses and bring them flowers. Sports isn’t for wimps or nerds. That’s never going to change. Violence is just a part of mankind. It’s a primal thing.

2

I bet the ESPN link would be useful. :smiley: Just to be clear, I fully support firing this jerk. Temper tantrums when you’re supposed to be coaching isn’t acceptable. This guy is just a bully and an asshole.

There’s ways to coach tough without freaking out like this. Throwing a temper tantrum wipes out any respect that players have for a coach.

http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/9125796/practice-video-shows-rutgers-basketball-coach-mike-rice-berated-pushed-used-slurs-players

3

Here’s one opinion.

4

I don’t agree with that at all, and of course, the violence is expected to come from other players during the game - not the coach during practice.

By “grown ass man,” of course, you mean an 18- to 22-year-old college student trying to make a basketball team. Some of them are scholarship athletes who think the guy screaming at them holds their future in his hands, and others are walkons just trying to make the team. You have misunderstood this situation as completely as anyone could possibly misunderstand it. The problem here is not that the players are pussies, it’s that the coach abused his authority in a disgusting way. It doesn’t matter what the players felt about it - and some of them have defended Rice anyway.

Yes, because this is basketball, not dodgeball. Having balls thrown at you is not part of the game. Neither is having a guy humiliate you by calling you a faggot every time you miss a defensive assignment. If a player does either of those things, he’s called for a technical or he’s out of the game. But your argument is that a coach should have the authority to do that over and over in practice whenever he feels like it, and that’s crap. And again, you misunderstood the situation: the players didn’t complain, or at least some of them didn’t. The complaint came from a coach who felt that this was wrong. Of course it is also true that a significant number of players left the team, and now I presume they’re playing for coaches who don’t treat them like this. That’s a great way to build a successful program!

Well, yeah. That’s why the word is an insult. Is there supposed to be some other response when someone in a position of authority over you calls you a faggot over and over? Are you supposed to be anything other than insulted? Because the intention is to insult you.

Yeah, that’s what Rice said. I know how this song and dance goes: coaches are supposed to have nearly infinite latitude to abuse their players in the interest of motivating and toughening them up. It’s bullshit. That may have been Rice’s intention, but it’s not what he did. What he did was bully and demoralize his team, and it doesn’t seem to have helped their performance based on their record. I accept that some yelling and screaming can go with the territory, but that falls way short of what Rice was doing.

And on top of taking it too far, he did it wrong.

OK, and this has what to do with the situation? You said yourself that there’s a gulf between toughening players up and screaming at them like this maniac was doing, so why bring this up in the first place?

I’m pretty nerdy and I’ve played plenty of sports. I don’t know what the hell “violence is part of mankind” is supposed to have to do with a coach who thinks it’s OK to throw things at his players and call them faggots.

5

Because of the vast sums of money involved, we’ve given coaches at the professional and major college levels altogether too much power so some, of course, will abuse it. Sometimes I think it would be a much better sports world if we didn’t allow them on the fields or courts during the games. Their jobs should be preparing the players for the competition; after that it should be up to the players to act upon what they’ve been taught.

Nothing irritates me more than a college football offense coming up to the line of scrimmage, then all standing up and looking over to the sideline for the revised call. It’s especially egregious when Navy does it because they only run three fucking plays.

6

I was just making the point that a good coach pushes his players. It requires a certain tough mindset to coach sports. But at the same time the coach has to know when to back off. If a guy is giving a 100% then trying to push him harder is counter productive. Same thing with an injured player. A coach should back off and give the guy time to see the doctors and rehab the injury.

I went a little overboard with my OP last night. 20/20 got me pretty ticked off. They were showing the Rutgers tape and really ripping into coaching and sports in general. Practically giving the impression that there was something wrong with intense competition. I know in my own case that the drive to get better and play the best that we could was the motivation behind all those hours of sweaty drills. I played in a small conference and we weren’t all that good, but we gave a 100% commitment to the team.

The coach at Rutgers wasn’t anybody I’d play for. He was so out of control and just a pathetic joke. Cursing and shoving players isn’t leadership, it’s just bullying.

7

OK. I didn’t see the piece, but I take your general point: no, coaches certainly don’t have to be nice all the time and they’re allowed to use a variety of different approaches and tactics. But there need to be limits, and this guy went far past them just like Bob Knight and other guys have. If anything sports culture is way too tolerant of assholes like this just because they supposedly “get results.”

8

Imma just drop this link right here.

9

Coaches can be hardasses and even be hatefully mean, and for some coaches at the college level I think that is part of their system and part of what works for them. Different coaches have different styles.

I don’t think we should get to a place where we force coaches to “be nice” to players. But there is a difference between being tough and mean and being unprofessional and abusive. When your “tough” style of coaching results in you physically throwing stuff at players and acting like a lunatic you’ve probably crossed over from being a hard ass professional coach into being an unprofessional one.

When you scream the word faggot at your players over and over again you’re being abusive beyond what is appropriate. Further, that’s a word that just insults the sexuality of straight players but is basically the equivalent of a racial slur for any gay players. How would we feel if he was calling his black basketball players niggers?

10

That’s the point I was trying to make. But Martin said it better and in fewer words. :wink:

Years ago I pretty much thought of the word faggot as someone that was soft or weak. A player that gave up. It wasn’t a accusation that the player had a hot date with another guy. :smiley: The original meaning of the word had been replaced long ago.

But in todays world the word shouldn’t be used. It’s just not appropriate. It certainly shouldn’t be screamed at players like that Rutgers coach did.

11

Twenty years ago my football coach did the same things. It didn’t bat an eyelash for anyone. He’s certainly out of control, but strong language can be a motivating force if done right. When not done right (how IMHO he did it) it is degrading. Plus, in 2013, you can’t use the word “faggot” anymore. Right or wrong, it’s reached the N word level.

12

The coach was/is a tool and deserves what happened to him.

I keep hoping one day people will start behaving as if they are always being video taped. There is no privacy anymore. Even in situations where you KNOW they are no camera phones trained on, you should act like there are. Forget about God and Santa Claus. YouTube is watching and it don’t play.

13

I sort of feel like this is the sports equivalent of “telling it like it is”. Namely, the excuse trotted out by malcontents to justify their lousy behavior. No, I’m not an asshole, I’m just super competitive.
BTW, the faggot comment was completely out of line. This was done at Rutgers. Just a couple of years ago, right about the time Rice became coach, a Rutgers freshman jumped off the George Washington Bridge because his roommate humiliated him for being gay, and he’s pulling out the old faggot insult?

14

I realized that since I was at the Louisville/ Rutgers game this year I am most likely the only one here who saw the two teams involved in college basketball’s biggest stories live. And on the same night.

15

That’s the key right there.

It’s not a matter of “toughness” or political correctness but finally getting around to cleaning up bits of unacceptable behavior we tolerated in years past.

When I was a child growing up in Arkansas, even the “n word” wasn’t considered so bad. You had defenders saying, “It’s just a descriptive word that comes from Negro”. Of course it wasn’t.

For whatever reason, Americans (among others) have a culture of machismo where we associate any physical and emotional abuse as instilling ‘toughness’. It doesn’t for everybody. And we’ve known that for years. We know there’s a line. We know when somebody crosses it. And we now do something about it.

And Coach Rice was so far over the line, it’s ridiculous anybody is even half-heartedly defending him or this sorts of behavior.

Nope.

That’s still the original (American) meaning of the word. Even in the 80s/90s Arkansas of my youth, being called a ‘faggot’ = being a weak pansy, i.e. you were associated with the sort of limp-wristed nancy boys who’d rather prance around in women’s underwear and not with the big, strong football stars who dated the prom queen and could kill a buck at 500 yards with your bare hands.

It doesn’t matter that it was a figurative rather than a literal insult. It was still wrong, and we’re finally getting to the point it’s recognized as wrong.

16

I’m not even sure the people who are supposed to be toughened up really are. If so, then why do so many still lack the resolve to fight against their initial abusers? Are they toughened up or just beaten into submission?