… that the only change in university sports wafting out of The Steamed Rice affair will be totally closed practices. Quite a few university coaches behave like Mike Rice – Rice simply got caught. So you have to keep coaches from getting caught.
Caught by the normal world. The cynical, twisted world of universities dominated, as Rutgers is, by sports, will let the behavior go with a handslap. Too much money at stake. You want the coach to make each player as much of an asshole as he is so they’ll win games. Rutgers didn’t fire Rice until the normal world responded normally to his disgusting behavior. Disgusting in any setting, but really disgusting in a university. Rutgers has no shame.
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So. Lesson? George writes:
Lock the gym doors. Hang a notice declaring that practice is closed. Tape brown paper over the windows if necessary.
But that strategy is clunky and risky in its obviousness. Not only will locked gym doors attract attention; your university’s coach is likely to feel free to be even more violent if he knows he’s truly alone with the players.
No, the solution, as is so often the case in university education these days, lies in synchronous interactive online pedagogy. The only way to keep the coach’s fingers away from the players’ necks is to separate coach and player, placing the players in the gym and the coach well away from them. A reasonably simple bit of software (SafeCoach) will allow practices to proceed nicely, coach watching and screaming from the comfort of his home or office. Players can turn the sound down when coaches enter into their most acute psychotic episodes.
April 4th, 2013 at 3:22PM
Unfortunately, I’ve seen travel soccer coaches speak to seven and eight year olds that way. It is pretty sad when a teenage referee ejected a forty something adult for the way the coach yelled at his own players.
I was pretty surprised that Temple’s Cheney retired rather than die on the court. Most Temple fans assumed he would pop a blood vessel and stoke out while screaming at his team during a game.
April 4th, 2013 at 3:36PM
Barbara: On Cheney: LOL.