3 When does tough coaching become bullying?

Interesting example around football. I mean I do – we do a little bit of work in football. And you know if you think about sport as the same as any other domain, in any other profession or in any other occupation, and even, you know, what you might not - what you wouldn't call bullying necessarily but harsh language - so using expletives, the way that you talk to people, it would be totally unacceptable in any other workplace. But in sport such as football it’s perfectly fine to f and Jeff at the players for example and people accept that as normal whereas actually that’s not normal, you know, you'd get sacked. I'd get sacked if I spoke to people in some of the ways that we see football coaches and other coaches speaking to players. So it becomes normalised so if you're in a sport from a young age you kind of get used to that behaviour and it’s just normal you know. Everyone speaks to everyone in that fashion but when you're outside of that industry or outside of that sport in other domains you think how do people accept that? That’s just unacceptable behaviour.

Yeah I agree there because there has been a time where although I say I have never experienced it looking back then from what you’ve just said I have been under managers that the minute with Mark he’s so much more for developing the player. Not only being as a manager but developing if you like even at my age, wants things like still get more out of you and you can still learn. But then the old manager at Birmingham when I was there, Marcus, he’s the kind to kick a bottle in your face, throw tactic sheets at your head, shout at you sprout you but we didn’t know any better so we looked up to that and that got the best out of us and that made us the team we became. And we was the underdogs that then all of a sudden teams were turning up at our place thinking ‘whew – these are gonna be trouble.’ But we didn’t look at him as him being – some of the girls did and they didn’t like it,

Were you prepared to accept it because it worked essentially?

I work by a rough tough more tough-like management like that. Like everyone – they are individuals. Some people if the manager knows them well enough like Marcus at Birmingham; he will know what players he can do it with but not to the extent at what Marcus did. But if Marcus – I was the one he kicked the bottle in the face. That was just purely accident. He just kicked the bottle across the room and it’s hit me in the face but I had to stand up and kind of look at the wall so it isn't my fault. It’s no good me now kicking off 'cos for the team but we actually respond better to that. Another girl got the tactic papers threw at her head and told ‘you’re rubbish. What are you doing? You should be going and playing at …’ I don't want to repeat what he said but it worked and yeah.

So because it worked you feel like it was okay?

I feel it’s okay but I know there was people in that team that was like ‘it’s disgusting. That is not happening.’ But people overlooked it because of the results we was getting.

Are there things that you wouldn't be prepared to accept?

Not me personally.

You know things that are said at half time or the way that training happens you know are there things that you look back at and think well actually maybe we shouldn’t have accepted that?

Yeah but under Marcus yes because looking back now I think well yeah okay that’s probably a bit too far but at the time it worked. It got us results. We did well. We won things. You know, no one questions is if we were losing and he’s doing it then people are gonna start you know making an issue of it. So it can go either way.

While we’re on this subject I do want to bring in something that’s from – we dug out from the archives last week. This is about oh I should think the early 2000s. I won't play you the whole thing because it’s about four minutes long. You can listen to it on the Weekend Sport Preview if you're that way inclined. But it’s a bit of Billy Mims who was the Leicester Riders head coach at a time when they lost eighteen matches in a row. Radio Leicester went up to a game in Sheffield, their nineteenth, and they were twenty points down at half time so heading for a nineteenth straight defeat. Here’s a little bit of what he had to say at half time:

It’s embarrassing watching our failure defensively. It’s embarrassing watching players make excuses. I‘m not making excuses. We suck right now. We are the worst team in this country right now. And I chose every one of you here. I'm not making excuses. I'm not hiding from it. We are bad defensively. I’m a bad defensive coach so I'm asking you for some help.

Professor Chris Cushion – what do you make of that?

Well I understand the message and I totally get what the coach is trying to say it’s just the method of delivery is entirely unacceptable in the modern age. You don’t speak to human beings in that way. It’s bullying behaviour so humiliation, belittling, shouting at people – it’s totally unnecessary. I don’t know why it’s acceptable in sport that you feel you have to shout at people to get your message across.

Well it’s interesting because Rachel is saying you know for her that sort of treatment kind of worked –

Absolutely. I suspect that Rachel’s played football for a long time and has become kind of accustomed to that. I mean you know –

Yeah there was more of it when we was younger coming up so I'm used to that. But the younger ones coming through now with this next generation of players coming through they're not used to it and they're not ready for it so some of them are bored to tears whereas as players we then go and pick them back up.