The Sports Doc Chalk Talk

No child should ever have to endure through the emotional pain that the sexual victims of Jerry Sandusky or Bernie Fine went through, yet the reality is that thousands of kids in the United States each year are put into compromising sexual positions by coaches and other adults involved in youth and interscholastic sports.  I know, as I have personally worked with countless families, school districts, and youth leagues that have had to respond to such allegations.  I also know that we have lagged terribly behind when it comes to providing appropriate training and oversight for coaches so that we can better protect children who sign up to play sports, not be forced to guard molesters from stealing their innocence.

To see how safe your child is and to quickly gauge how well your child’s youth sport league or school team is doing to protect kids from pedophiles, please take a moment to answer the following questions:

1.) Does your child’s youth league or school require a criminal background check for every coach that is hired?  While it is true that more leagues and schools are doing this today, please note one very important related detail pertaining to background checks: If the perpetrator has never been caught before, he or she will easily make it past this threshold. What this means is that background checks are certainly important, but if you are relying on them to effectively weed out pedophiles you may have an over-inflated sense of their worth.  Case in point – both Jerry Sandusky from PSU and Bernie Fine from Syracuse abused boys for over 20 years each, yet only in the last few months were they arrested.

If your child’s youth sports league or school does NOT have a mandatory criminal background check add 1 point to your score.

2.) Does your child’s Athletic Director or League Operator require ongoing professional training and development that includes training in psychosocial issues (i.e. appropriate boundaries, burnout, performance supplement abuse, etc.)?  Most schools and leagues only require a minimal level of first aid training, unfortunately, leaving countless coaches nationwide with zero training in the interpersonal aspects of coaching kids.  If your school or league is not teaching coaches about interpersonal issues, like hazing, it’s much more likely your child will eventually experience a problem that likely could have been prevented with just a minimal amount of psychosocial training.

If your child’s youth sports league or school does NOT have a mandatory professional training and development that includes training in psychosocial issues, add 1 point to your score.

3.) School Sports ONLY – Does your child’s school coaching staff comprise of at least 50% teacher-coaches? Most parents are surprised to learn that in most schools across America today over 70% of the coaches in the school are non-teacher coaches. What this means is that unlike the coach prototype found in schools just a generation ago, most coaches in schools today come from the community at-large, and while they might know the X’s and O’s of the sport they coach, it’s very likely that they have never had any formal training to work closely with kids.  Teacher-coaches, on the other hand, have earned a college degree, been trained to work with kids, and are required to keep up with professional development to maintain their teaching license.   Of course, this does not mean teacher-coaches are better, nor does it mean that they never cross the line with kids — but it does illustrate how important it is to know who is coaching your child and what training he or she has attained.

If your child’s school does NOT have at least 50% of it’s coaching staff also employed as teachers, add 1 point to your score.

4.) Has your youth sports league or school athletic department had previous issues in the last 10 years with pedophiles, sexual predators, or sexual molesters? In today’s technology-driven world, it’s not uncommon for pedophiles to share information in chat rooms and other private forums online, and leagues and schools that are easier to prey upon will often see a greater number of these folks look into trying to coach in the school or league. 

If your child’s youth sports league or school has had at least one sexual molestation charge in the last ten years, add 1 point to your score.

5.) Is your youth sports league or school athletic department currently using Sport Success 360? Unlike other coach training courses, Sport Success 360 is the only training course in the world that includes dedicated training devoted to helping coaches create safe and healthy boundaries between them and the kids that they coach. Sport Success 360 includes many additional psychosocial training components and is designed to help train coaches to in turn help kids have the best, safest, and most enriching sport experience they can possibly have!

Subtract your points if your child is benefiting from Sport Success 360 in his youth league or school.

What your score means:

0 points: Your child’s sports league or school is doing an outstanding job of preparing its coaches to safely and effectively mentor kids.  While it is still true that problems can occur, the odds are reduced dramatically by the measures your league or school has put in place.

1-2 points: Your child’s sports league or school is in great need of delivering timely, appropriate, professional training to its coaches, especially as it pertains to appropriate boundaries between coaches and kids.

3-4 points: Your child is participating in a very high-risk youth sports league or school athletic department.  Check with your league operator or athletic director immediately about future plans for contemporary psychosocial training.

Sport Success 360 is the premier training course when it comes to helping coaches with the many unique issues they face in youth sports today, including developing successful, safe, and meaningful relationships with kids.  Talk to your league operator, school athletic director (or other school administrators) about how you can implement Sport Success 360 today!
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Sadly, in just the last month we have witnessed horrible child sex crimes surface at Penn State and Syracuse, finally directing much needed national attention toward a growing problem in our country today.  Yes, as much as we would like to not admit it, there are thousands of kids each year who compete in sports and fall prey to adult pedophiles who take advantage of the trust and rapport built through the coach-student athlete relationship.  While most of these cases go unreported by the victims (usually due to guilt, shame, and embarrassment), there are still more than enough stories out there that can be read about by doing a Google search.  I can also report that in my role as a clinician, I have witnessed firsthand the number of these cases emerge – prompting me to work with various state and national leaders in sports to help change laws and training requirements.

At Penn State, many staff and college personnel have lost their jobs, with more expected to go in the months ahead as Jerry Sandusky goes to court.  At Syracuse, Bernie Fine has been dismissed, and head coach Jim Boeheim may not be far behind after he blasted the victims and accused them of looking to capitalize financially, rather than stop for a moment to think they might really have been raped by his good friend and colleague.  Boeheim might be a great basketball coach, but he failed terribly in showing zero compassion and sympathy for the victims of Bernie Fine.

Even ESPN, the self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports,” is also feeling the heat today after reportedly sitting on potential evidence pertaining to the Syracuse sex scandal and not doing anything about it for eight years. Today, ESPN responded to the charges they face from the public for sitting idle. Regardless of the thin veil ESPN has in defending their actions because they are “journalists,” it does make you wonder how anyone could sit on this kind of information from a moral sense. If you heard a tape that included comments like Larry Fine’s wife’s did, wouldn’t you report it to the police??

When any of us come into information about a child sex crime we all need to report and support! In other words, we need to report the crime to authorities and support the victim for the courage it takes to talk about the crimes that were alleged to have occurred. Of course, this may not be easy to do — especially if you know the alleged perpetrator, but it is the right thing to do. Trust me, as a clinician I can tell you that child sex abuse is as scarring and damaging as anything a young person can ever experience, and it is for this reason that we all must do a better job in protecting kids from pedophiles.

Why these problems in sports are important to address

While we have made great strides in training youth and interscholastic coaches over the years, one area we still fall terribly behind in pertains to training coaches about appropriate boundaries.  Ironically, we have made tremendous progress teaching coaches about about nutrition, injury management, and concussions, but yet we still haven’t made the progress we need to when it comes to properly training youth and interscholastic coaches about appropriate, healthy, and safe boundaries.  The coach-athlete relationship is arguably the most dangerous relationship as it applies to sex abuse for a number of reasons:

• Most parents unconditionally trust coaches to be responsible with their kids.  Sadly, some pedophiles know this quite well, and as a result take advantage of how easily it is to become a coach today.  Of course, most coaches do a great job of working with kids and would never think of harming a child, but it is never advised to blindly trust anyone with your kids.
• Sports provide many unique places for inappropriate relationships to take place, including locker rooms, hotels, and after hours at schools waiting for parents to pick up kids after practice.
• The fraternal bonding often found in sports can sometimes go over the line unknowingly, as Jerry Sandusky’s comments about “horsing around in the shower” revealed to us.  Usually by the time a child is sexually molested, it happens as a result of slow and steady trust developed over time, which often includes “normalizing” inappropriate fraternal relationships
• Teacher-coaches, once comprising of almost all coaching jobs in schools, has now become a memory of the past.  Today’s roughly 75% (or more) of coaches in schools today are non-teacher coaches.  Due to the dearth of teacher-coaches available, increasingly more schools have had to reach out to their local community in order to find adults willing and interested in coaching.  As a result, in some cases, the hiring process happens very quickly out of the school’s desperate need for a coach, and often the newly hired coach does not have a background search completed, nor is he given proper training and mentoring.
• State and national standards are still lagging, as there are no formal continuing education requirements today that mandate coaches to better understand boundaries with kids, as well as warning signs and appropriate protocols for when a youngster bravely steps forward to report a crime.  This needs to change ASAP!

Last year we developed Sport Success 360 as a tool for schools and youth leagues to use to better prepare coaches with respect to psychosocial training in sports.  Some of the training modules are traditional (i.e. communicating effectively with parents), while others are more contemporary (i.e. dealing with youth sports burnout).  We also developed a module to address inappropriate boundaries, offering coaches, parents, and student athletes keen insights and tips to help prevent, respond, and report issues when they occur. I urge you to learn more about Sport Success 360, and especially the training offered around boundaries, as we can see this issue is certainly one that we can no longer ignore or overlook.

www.drstankovich.com

As we regain our perspective on the horrendous sexual crimes that were alleged to have occurred at Penn State regarding Jerry Sandusky and countless young boys, many people are just as confused at how many Penn State athletic department personnel seemingly kept the stories from surfacing as much as they are in Sandusky committing the crimes in the first place.  I have had a number of incredibly provocative conversations in the past week about this tragedy, with most of the dialogue centering around how the people who knew about kids being sexually abused could have possibly kept their mouths shut and not reported it immediately to the police.  It is from this position of curiosity that I attempt to offer a few thoughts on why this negligence may have occurred — reasons that go much deeper than the immediate surface level that clearly speaks to the importance of immediately reporting allegations of sexual crimes, especially when it includes innocent children.

Again, I would like to be very clear with something before I delve into the psychological variables that were likely at play and prevented people from speaking up when they came into news about Jerry Sandusky sexually abusing children — what Sandusky did was clearly wrong, and about as horrible a crime that could ever be committed. It was also very wrong for anyone – be it a coach, administrator, janitor, or anyone else to have not acted and called the police when they first learned of these crimes.  I say this as I want to be as straightforward as I can be about where I stand morally as my views pertain to this situation.  In fact, I cannot think of a single reason to not immediately protect innocent children – this case is a no-brainer when it comes to doing the “right” thing.  Still, it appears many people did not do the right thing – and that’s where I would like to pick up today.

Assuming these crimes did occur (and there is a mountain of allegations and pending evidence suggesting the charges are indeed true), the big question seems to be around how so many people who supposedly knew of Sandusky’s crimes (either directly through personal observation or indirectly through reliable source information) could have remained silent and not reported Sandusky to the police?  It does appear from news reports that a minimal level of legal responsibility occurred in the graduate assistant telling Coach Paterno, and Paterno supposedly reporting the news to his superiors.  Still, there were no calls to the police and worse yet, no follow up on the rape victim?  How could this have ever happened?

There are really only a few possibilities, actually.

1.) Everyone at Penn State was “in on it” and participated in some sort of underground sex ring operation. This premise, while clearly outlandish, would assert that not only did people cover up these tragedies, but that they also willing facilitated and/or participated in the crimes. So far the only perpetrator mentioned has been Sandusky, so we can assume (for now) that no other PSU employee was a part of these crimes through direct involvement.

2.) All the PSU athletic staff is comprised of “bad” people who are heartless and indifferent about the well-being of kids. Again, this assumption is quite shallow and an incredible stretch.  Even if you believe some people in this world are inherently “bad” people, the likelihood of an entire staff to be seemingly this aloof probably speaks to other interpersonal dynamics at play more than it does the moral code of all the individuals supposedly “in the know” about what happened (in other words, I can’t see anyone on the PSU staff thinking for even a minute that this stuff was “OK”).  The verdict?  It’s very unlikely PSU is comprised of terrible, kid-hating employees.

3.) The group dynamics at-play dramatically impacted the perception and action (or lack thereof) following reports of these crimes. Group dynamics refer to the study of groups, and how individuals sometimes change their thinking and behaviors as a result of the group’s norms, roles, desire to belong and be accepted, and social influence.  More simply, we as people oftentimes act differently when in groups than we do as individuals.  Again, this is not an excuse as much as it is an explanation, as it in no way “clears” or makes the folks at PSU less culpable for not acting.  It does, however, prompt us to widen our perspective and examine some additional factors that may have impacted individual decision making.

Sport psychologists spend a lot of time studying group dynamics, and it behooves them to do so when you consider how many sports today are “team” sports.  Group dynamics include the delicate, tenuous, ever-changing relationships individuals have with one another, all played out on the canvass we commonly refer to as “team culture.”  Group dynamics help us understand and explain, to some extent, why people do things differently in groups than they would if left to their own devices.  These dynamics also typically include power, coercion, and suggestion (direct and indirect).  In groups, there is also commonly a “diffusion of responsibility” that often occurs, whereby individuals in the group simply assume that “somebody else will do it.” If you hated singing as a kid and yet were made to be part of a choir, it’s likely you may have lip-synced during the performances, knowing that others would “pick up the slack” and compensate for your decision to not sing.

Group dynamics are a lot easier to discuss and examine when talking about innocuous subjects, like the choir example above.  Unfortunately, these dynamics also occur in situations as horrible as the current PSU scandal, and yes, even in cases of rape there are countless examples of people over the course of time who had information and simply sat on it – never telling anyone, including police.  This is terrible, morally speaking, but from an understanding perspective it’s important we go deeper in order to better understand (not justify) the situation.

4. Denial – out of sight, out of mind. Again, it may be hard to believe that we as people can sometimes do this, but it’s well accepted amongst mental health professionals that for some horrific crimes (like rape), people can (and do) sometimes completely block the story from their mind.  For the victim this may even help with short-term healing by not having to replay dark memories when trying to regain personal strength.  Sometimes we hear stories that we think are so outlandish that we erroneously believe there was no way they could have occurred — and many would argue the Sandusky story might easily fit within that line of thinking.  The point is that denial is an ego defense, and it is something we all do from time-to-time.  In the PSU case, it’s quite possible that when some of the personnel heard “rumors” about Sandusky that they simply could not get their arms around there being any way in the world the rumors could have been true — after all, to the untrained eye how could a guy running a program for kids ever in a million years sexually abuse kids???

What happened at Penn State was dead wrong, and all the explanations of the psychological variables that may have impacted the situation do not justify or minimize the horrific nature of child sexual abuse.   It is important, however, that we learn more about why nobody seemed to have acted responsibly, as well as the variables that impact group culture that appear to have clearly impacted what happened at Penn State.  When we better understand how terrible things can happen through oversight, negligence, covert pressures, and diffused responsibilities, we can better identify when future problems may be developing and more swiftly and responsibly attend to them.

www.drstankovich.com

As we await Joe Paterno’s final fate at Penn State pertaining to the Jerry Sandusky pedophile case (where Paterno was expected to act more swiftly and comprehensively out of moral obligation, if not legal expectations), many PSU fans (as well as sports fans across America) are experiencing what is known in the psychology world as cognitive dissonance.  What this means is that people often experience distress when attempting reconcile two opposite and competing views (in the case of Paterno, his “good guy” status of running a clean program for 40+ years versus the accusations where he acted passively when provided with the news of Jerry Sandusky raping a child in the PSU locker room shower).  If you are struggling to make sense of all this, and how such a respected and revered figure like Joe Paterno could also be the same guy who did very little to help an innocent child who was raped on campus, then you are experiencing cognitive dissonance.

The Responsibilities of Coaches?

Perhaps the bigger question, though, is the pedestal we have come to place coaches on these days – a position that gives off the impression either indirectly (Joe Paterno simply maintaining a clean record for many years) or directly (Jim Tressel writing books on character and morality) that coaches are somehow “above the fray” and incapable of making bad decisions, cheating, or acting irresponsibly.  Is it time we re-frame the roles and responsibilities of coaches – in other words, simply responsible for building winning teams, and not responsible for morals, character development, leadership, integrity, and all those other wonderful adjectives that have over the years become what we expect from coaches?  Keep in mind aside from youth sports (and even this is questionable), coaches are hired to develop winning athletic teams.  Coaches are not hired to be moral saints — that only comes along as a bonus if the coach can also win games.  We don’t expect superior morals from our accountant, barber, or mailman, so why do we expect our coaches to never make mistakes?  This is not meant to minimize the crimes at PSU, but instead to have us reflect on what pedestal we have put coaches on over the years.

With all the big money being given to coaches these days, and all the commercialization of sports through the mainstream media, it’s easy to see how coaches have transformed into bigger-than-life characters – making their transgressions become even more shocking and alarming.  It’s obvious that Paterno should have done much more than passively mention to his superiors that he heard a concerning story, but if we only knew Paterno as simply a football coach would our reaction today be so shocking (remember, he fulfilled his legal obligation to report to his superiors)?  Of course we would have still wanted him to do more, but many people would have also minimized his exposure and placed his value within the university perhaps differently.  In other words, his lack of action would still be bad, but would it be this bad?  Maybe – but it’s also possible more people would quickly turn their attention away from the football coach and toward college administrators more responsible for the culture and reputation of the university – not to mention the welfare of the victims.

Should Society Re-calibrate the Way Coaches are Perceived?

My purpose in writing this today is not to minimize the value of coaches today, but to perhaps help us recalibrate our views of what coaches should be in the eyes of society.  Coaches teach athletes how to play sports – and really good coaches sometimes go above these expectations and provide life skills, off-field mentoring, and appropriate social modeling.  But these are the exceptions, not the norm.  Similar to how accountants go to work to crunch numbers, or journalists go to work to write stories, some coaches would like to go to work and teach X’s and O’s and not assume the greater responsibilities of teaching and mentoring athletes when those responsibilities should be the responsibility of parents.  Why is it that we expect coaches to be responsible for life skills development, but don’t expect that from college professors, employers, or other adults who are involved with kids?

It’s clear that in the aftermath of the past year, one in which major college coaches including Jim Tressel, Joe Paterno, and Bruce Pearlman have faced harsh criticism from perceived expectations, that maybe it’s time to revisit the role coaches play in the overall success of society.  Should these men and women be expected to be perfect, or should we never have had such lofty expectations of coaches in the first place?  The crimes that occurred at Penn State are horrific, and it goes without saying that anyone/everyone who came into information about child abuse should have acted swiftly and responsibly (including Joe Paterno), but maybe it’s also time for us to re-position coaches, the expectations of coaches, and the magnitude of the responsibilities that have been placed upon coaches.

Perhaps we wouldn’t have as much cognitive dissonance if we viewed coaches as more human and capable of human errors rather than “Gods” simply because they know how to draw up winning plays on a sports field.

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