Life Lessons from Sports: What about the Sixty Years after College?

In ancient Roman schools, boys who failed to learn their lessons were beaten on their bare backs with a ferula, a long piece of flat wood. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and we rarely hear about corporal punishment in the classroom, even of the kind I recall from childhood, like the paddle, knuckles rapped with a ruler, or kneeling on raw peas. Treatment of this type by a teacher today would be called assault and battery.

Yet in collegiate sports a coach who shoves his player “to motivate” him merely gets a mild rebuke from the university administration. Another coach, who threw basketballs at his players’ heads and knees, kicked them, and called them insulting names, has recently been fired . . . but only after the smoking gun of video went viral on the Internet.

Life lessons from sports? To be sure, quite a few life lessons are being learned by the victims of these coaches. What it’s like to be abused by a caretaker would be one. And, paraphrasing Menander, the lesson that you haven’t been trained unless you’ve been flogged. Sadly, many of the players, typical of abuse victims, defend their abusers by saying “it was for my own good.”

Remove the physical abuse from consideration and a dictatorial drill sergeant mentality, which would not likely be tolerated in a classroom teacher, still dominates coaching in sports. The mentality is often defended under the blather of providing valuable “life lessons.” Dependent robots and obedience to authority are what these coaches want and get.*

Independent thinking is the life lesson kids most desperately need to be learning—at home, in the classroom, and in sports. They need to be thinking about what they will do with their lives after the sports end, and the sports will end in college, if not sooner, for nearly all of them. What happens then? Get a job stocking shelves at Walmart?

Half of all college athletes after they graduate make less money than their non-athletic counterparts. Why? Because they don’t have the work experience and internships to put on their resumes that the non-athletes have. Athletes are expected by their drill sergeants to spend up to 45 hours per week on their sport. Throw in two hours of homework for every hour in class and not much time is left in the week. The “solution,” of course, for college athletes is to take fewer units and perhaps not ever graduate, or take puffcake courses like billiards, bowling, and water color painting.

Walmart is a fine place to work, but working there after college is not why one gets that degree.

If  the words “fraud” and “exploitation” come to mind in relation to amateur sports, there is good reason. The National Collegiate Athletic Association deserves the epithets the most. Fraud because, as scathingly chronicled, with analogies to slavery, by civil rights historian Taylor Branch (1, 2), there is nothing amateur—in expertise and, especially, money—about today’s sports. And exploitation, because the kids never see a penny of the billions they earn for their universities.

Scholarships are payment, no? No. The so-called full ride, contingent on not getting injured, still leaves an average of $3200 a year to cough up out of pocket, leaving some of the kids from poor families without grocery money or bus fare home for spring break. Another life lesson learned!

The obsession that parents and coaches in youth leagues have over landing a scholarship to college is, to put it mildly, absurd. Aside from the minuscule chance of being granted one, scholarship is still not necessary in most states to get a college education.**

In my thirty-plus years as a college professor, I have had my share of athletes in the classroom. One Division 1 football player told me his practices were from 2:00 – 6:00PM. My class started at 6:00, so he was always late. After four or five weeks, I never saw or heard from him again.

Another football player (at a different school) attended my class just after completing his first season in the National Football League. He made two pointed comments to me about why he was in that seat. One, that unlike his teammates he was determined to finish his degree. The second was his observation that when playing in the NFL you are just a  highly paid blue-collar worker. Meaning there was no way he was going to remain a blue-collar worker (or become a stock clerk at Walmart) when his playing days were over. This student went on to a successful career in the NFL and now has an equally successful career in business.

Projecting and setting goals beyond sports. That’s a good life lesson.



*”Legal, even celebrated child abuse” in Olympic gymnastics and figure skating was exposed by Joan Ryan in her 1995 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. “Absolute subservience” is how she described the demands of certain famous coaches.

**This assumes that education is what these parents and coaches really care about, as opposed to bragging rights about the child getting a scholarship to a Division 1 school. Forty percent of students in the California State University system receive no financial aid at all. They earn their education the old-fashioned way, going to community college for two years, then working 20-40 hours a week to earn the rest at a Cal State. And California is no longer among the least expensive states in which to attend college.

The Comparative Society

High school English teacher and poet, John Wooden (1, 2), also known as the highly successful, 27-year coach of UCLA basketball from 1948 to 1975, learned from his father that the key to success was never to compare oneself to others.

Compete only with yourself, Wooden the son would tell his players, by striving to do better than you did yesterday, last month, or last hour. During halftime Wooden would often not even talk about the other team, only about how each of his own players could improve in the second half.

Focus on bettering oneself, says Wooden, is what builds confidence, poise, and integrity, not to mention winning ball teams.

A “competitive society” is what most think our pseudo-capitalistic economy today is and beating the other guy—the ultimate comparison—is what competition supposedly is all about. But economic competition, as I have written before, is precisely the comparison-free bettering of oneself that Wooden describes.

Capitalism is a system of social cooperation where everyone wins by trading value for value. Entrepreneurs do not spend their days and nights thinking about how to beat the competition, but about how to improve their products and make them more affordable. Winning large market share is consequence of the focus on improvement, not the goal. Wooden would certainly concur with this description of economic competition.

In today’s obsessively comparative society, beating others shows up everywhere, especially and unfortunately in areas that relate to children. We have tiger moms forcing their children to take the “right” courses, attend the “right” schools, and play the “right” musical instruments. Why? To keep up with the Joneses, or rather, more specifically, to do better than the Joneses.

Our entire educational system, through grades, exams, and degrees, is institutionalized comparison. The no-child-left-behind act has merely ossified the system by making teaching to the test virtually mandatory and pushing advanced topics to lower and lower levels, such as algebra in sixth grade and reading and writing in kindergarten. And, of course, requiring lots of officiously mind-numbing busywork, usually called homework.* Why? American test scores are lower than those of the Japanese. We must be better!

“Pushing to lower levels,” meaning to younger ages, is not the prerogative of our education system. Organized youth sports continues its trend of putting younger and younger children through increasing hours of practice and game playing, week after week after week. Why? We have to be better than the other guy, we have to get our kids scholarships to get into college, and we have to prepare them properly, starting at the youngest age, or they won’t be able to compete at the high school or college level.

Indeed, education and youth sports share a similarity: both are dominated and controlled by adults. Traditional education systems, as Ken Robinson has amusingly pointed out, are created by college professors, which means their ultimate goal is not to meet the needs of students, but to turn out more college professors just like them.

Organized youth sports are organized and operated by adults for the sake of their own, adult needs. If the sports were organized for the children, fun and development would still be the primary goals. For many youth sports today, winning has become the only thing.

In education much can be accomplished by turning learning activities over to the kids. Hole-in-the-wall experiments conducted by 2013 TED Prize winner, Sugata Mitra, have spectacularly demonstrated how children can eagerly and without adult supervision teach themselves.

In a New Delhi slum, Mitra literally put a computer in a building wall, then walked away. The slum children, who had never seen a computer before, not only learned how to use it, but also learned English and, in other experiments, learned all about DNA! Most of the teaching came from each other. Minimal facilitation by grannies, not Oxford- or Cambridge-trained instructors, are all that has been needed to increase the learning.

If “truth is what works,” to borrow a much-reviled phrase from William James, then removal of the comparisons of grades, exams, and degrees in education seems to work. It works in Montessori schools. It works in hole-in-the-wall experiments.

Now if we can only implement the Wooden philosophy of removing comparison in sports. Regrettably, short of a return to the sandlot where kids are in charge, this does not seem likely.

When enormous amounts of money drive sports at the college and professional levels—twelve times as much money, for example, spent on athletes in one athletic conference as on academic students—can anyone seriously expect parents to turn their backs and say, “Let’s just do it because it’s fun”?

Perhaps what we need is to encourage more English teachers and poets to become coaches!



*This is not to say that advanced math and reading and writing cannot be learned at early ages. Montessori schools, by adapting the topics carefully to stage of development, inspire early learning every day, and without homework. But our traditional public and private schools do not teach via the Montessori method. They use the carrot and stick—grades, exams, and degrees—as motivators. Independence is not their goal. Obedience to authority is.

On Killing Creativity

To create something means to come up with something new, to rearrange existing objects or ideas and put them into a form that has not been done before. Everyone is creative because learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge, values, and skills by rearranging what we already have in our minds and integrating that content with what we are acquiring. When we learn, we craft new concepts, principles, values, and skills.

How creative each of us is varies and the process can be, and often is, stunted and destroyed. Some cultures are known to be more creative than others. For example, the Japanese education system produces students who score higher on standardized tests than Americans, yet American students and American culture are said to be more creative. How has this come about?

Ken Robinson, in a 2006 TED talk and, later, in his book The Element argues admirably that creativity should be just as important an objective of education as literacy and that our current one-size-fits-all system destroys it. This is the progressive idea of focusing on and stimulating the individual’s interests and therefore the individual’s imagination and inventiveness. It is this progressive influence in education and, no doubt, the overall non-authoritarian atmosphere of American culture that has allowed Americans to be more creative.

Robinson, however, like the progressives, erroneously clings to the government as supplier of education and blames the rise of  “one-size-fits-all” on the so-called factory model. Yet, it is precisely the government and all forms of authoritarian control that arrest and prevent imaginative thinking.

Government bureaucracy, using government guns as its means of control, only knows one-size-fits-all. In education, that calls for a core curriculum and both types of grading: evaluation and age-sequencing. Catering to needs and wants is something governments cannot do, or do very well.

As discussed in last month’s post, any type of physical force, trauma, neglect, or emotional abuse, severely hampers the development of self-esteem and independence. Without high degrees of these traits, children and adults become fearful of risk-taking experimentation—that is, they fear making mistakes that might be disapproved of and vilified by those who have been forcing, traumatizing, neglecting, or emotionally abusing them.

It was progressive educator Maria Montessori who realized that choice was crucial in the development of self-esteem and independence Her method of education, as a result, allows a maximum of choice in a structured environment. Montessori children who move on to more traditional schooling are known for their confidence and creativity.

Freedom to choose, which means freedom to make mistakes without fear of criticism or denigration, is the key to encouraging original thinking. Dictating to children—whether by parents, teachers, coaches, tiger moms, or stage moms—what the children must think and do is nearly as stunting and destructive as hitting or beating them.

In organized youth sports, the fear of making mistakes and lack of creativity and imagination has been pointed out by former National Hockey League star Wayne Gretzky. Lamenting today’s excessive control and domination by adults, Gretzky finds the origin of hockey creativity on the adult-less pond of yesteryear. In the current environment, he says, if kids are sent to the ice to play a scrimmage, the first thing a child will ask is, “What position do you want me to play?” The pond, Gretzky’s point being, as was the sandlot in the earlier days of baseball, was what taught kids how to make their own decisions. Today, they must bow to the dictates of the adults in charge, lest they be criticized for going against a coach’s system. The quality of play becomes cautious and mediocre, and often not fun.

The killing of creativity can be subtle and performed by apparently well-meaning adults. The premise of demanding obedience to authority can be expressed quietly and without obviously abusive techniques. It stems from the denial of choice. A parent, teacher, or coach who criticizes a child’s mistake and singles the child out as an example to others is demanding obedience to authority. The message to children under such a leader’s watch is that cautiousness, not imagination and creativity, is the path to the adult’s approval.

The well-meaning adult thinks that such criticism is what teaching is all about. But allowing mistakes and, as Montessori demonstrated, saving the correction for another time when a new teaching moment arises, are what build the foundation of creativity: namely confidence, self-esteem, and independence.

All forms of demands for obedience to authority, whether physical or mental, blatant or subtle, must be rejected.

“Miniature Adults,” the Marketing Concept, and a Montessori Approach to Organized Youth Sports

Being aware of and catering to the needs and wants of customers is the essence of marketing. The textbooks call this the “marketing concept” and emphasize that everyone in a business, from the president down to the lowliest stock person, should not make any decision or take any action without first considering the effects of the decision or action on customers. Contrary to what Marxists and leftists of all types say, it is through customer satisfaction that businesses earn their profits.

But the marketing concept applies to any organization that has constituents—nonprofits, as well as governmental agencies. The broader principle says simply: acknowledge and, to the extent possible and appropriate, satisfy the needs and wants of the person with whom one is interacting. This is not some self-sacrificial duty. Rather, it is the good manners of recognizing another person as an individual human being.

The problem is that many people, to use a popular expression, “get so caught up in themselves and their own egos” that that they become incapable of seeing life from another person’s perspective. The consequence of this type of behavior is inconsiderateness and disrespect. The problem is especially prevalent among parents and teachers in relation to young children, exemplified in acute form by adult attitudes in organized youth sports.

Bob Bigelow, former professional basketball player, has nailed this phenomenon in his book Just Let the Kids Play. As the title implies, the rise of elite or select teams in organized youth sports—those teams that hold tryouts and cut less effective players when better ones are found—has robbed youth not just of the fun of playing a sport, but also the chance of developing into a talented athlete later in adolescence.

With astute turns of phrase, Bigelow states: “The worst thing we adults do in youth sports is to forget that these players are not miniature adults or high school stars in some kind of larval stage. They are children, with bones that have yet to develop, with minds that are not thinking the same way that we are thinking” (pp. 107-08). And, because these teams are all organized and managed by adults and often include travel out of town, out of state, and perhaps even across the country to play games on a schedule that would exhaust an adult professional team, Bigelow quips: “Parental egos and a full tank of gas—a frightening combination” (p. 111). Some of these teams consist of children as young as five!

The notion that children are not small adults comes from developmental psychology and was championed by Maria Montessori. Children have needs and wants that vary widely by age and most particularly differ from those of adults. The Montessori approach to education adapts learning to the appropriate developmental stage while giving the child as much independence and control in the learning process as possible. Bigelow, without any mention of Montessori in his book, urges the same approach in youth sports.

As Montessori hands over much of the teaching and learning to the children, Bigelow recommends the same for youth sports. For example, recalling the days on sandlots where no adults or coaches were present, children played, made up their own rules, and coached each other on the field. To bring this spirit back into organized youth sports, Bigelow recommends that baseball and softball players up through sixth grade should be the coaches on first and third bases, an idea that would turn most adult coaches today apoplectic!

His main point is that adults need to back off because development in athletics does not really blossom until after puberty. (Former National Basketball Association star Michael Jordan did not make his varsity high school team until junior year.) Playing on an elite team at five or eight or ten does not give anyone an advantage, but getting cut from such a team at five or eight or ten sends a clear message to the child that he or she is not good enough. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many a coach, as Bigelow points out, has seen uncoordinated freshmen and sophomores become stars in their junior and senior years.

It is a myth and a shame, as he puts it, that so many adults think “more, more, more” at a younger and younger age means better. It does not. It may mean overuse injuries and burnout. It may mean, as one young man told Bigelow about his experiences with youth hockey, “[It] stole my childhood.” The young man started learning to play hockey at age three and quit at thirteen because he hated it. Subsequently he became estranged from his father who had driven him to every practice and game.

Bigelow’s book zeroes in on what I have examined before: the stage parent syndrome (1, 2, 3). Stage parents push, that is, coerce, their children to do what the parents think their children should be doing. Often, the parents live vicariously through their children’s accomplishments. What parents are unaware of in this process is their children’s physical, cognitive, and emotional needs. The adults’ actions are all about the adults.

Not that adults do this deliberately or in a mean spirit. Most think they are doing what is best for their children . . . but the science isn’t there. Multiple sports experiences and free (unsupervised and unorganized) play produce better perception and decision making among elite athletes. The needs and wants of youth are to have fun. Just as fun should be the goal of any career one chooses to pursue, fun should be the goal of all sports, whether at the high school, college, or professional level, but especially at the youth level.

Youth sports is about the kids, not the adults.

There Are More Important Things in Life Than Softball

The impetus for this post is once again my daughter’s softball. She is currently playing in what is called “travel,” as opposed to “recreational,” ball and the seemingly endless string of practices and games almost every weekend tempt me to recite the title of this post to other parents.

Not that I want to take anything away from my daughter’s talent and desire to excel in a fun sport, nor the same of the other parents’ daughters, but a sense of perspective may be in order, especially considering the low odds of winning an athletic scholarship to college, the risks of injury (1, 2, 3) and burnout before even getting to that point, and the studies that now show multiple sports experiences and deliberate (unorganized) play develop better perception and decision making than the single, year-round specialization many young athletes today endure.

Sports, of course, are not the only activity of youth in which a nearly 24/7 pressure-cooker atmosphere exists. Music, dance, and drama teachers, and the children’s parents, not to mention the academic teachers, can also lay it on thick; the term “stage mom” (1, 2) that comes to us from the theatre keeps coming to mind.

Part of the obsession many coaches, teachers, and parents have about sports, or the arts and academics, stems from a misunderstanding of the differences between the less accomplished and the more accomplished, or between “amateur” and “professional.”

By “professional” here I mean only a greater degree of skill and dedication, not “paid professional,” though the young persons may be aiming for professional careers in sports or the arts or science and the coaches and teachers may be grooming them for that goal. In softball the difference is between “recreational” and “travel” ball and in the arts it may be the difference between performing in the local community and attending a select arts high school.

The assumed differences between these two levels, as stated by one youth baseball organization, include the possibility of failure and rejection in travel ball, but not in recreational; the alleged life lesson to sacrifice leisure to hard work so success will follow; and the supposed lack of need for instruction at this “nearly professional” level. There are kernels of truth in all three of these differences, but these kernels get distorted when coaches, teachers, and parents lose perspective, forgetting about the whole of life.

Take the difference about the possibility of failure. Even at a lower level of skill, such as in a marching band or softball, not everyone participates one-hundred percent of the time. Only some band members may perform in the pep band at basketball games and even fewer in the swing band. Soloists at the spring concert may be fewer than a handful. The same is true for softball; not everyone can be pitcher.

More important, not achieving an initial goal need not be viewed as failure. A clarinetist, for example, who transfers from a small-town marching band to an arts high school orchestra may not earn one of the top four positions in the orchestra. This eye-opening awareness of the greater skill of others should be experienced as motivator, not a threat to success or happiness. There is no more important attitude to cultivate than seeing others’ achievements as an inspiration.

To say that youth should sacrifice leisure to hard work so success will follow is misleading, especially if it is presented as “we expect you to give up your vacation” for the sake of softball, or music, etc. Paid professionals do not do this, except on occasion, mainly because they know their schedules well in advance. The problem with youth sports is that communication, advance or otherwise, is often lacking, leading to surprises in the schedule.

Hard work, yes; and all children who enjoy an activity, whether it be sports, the arts, or a business or science club will, if not hampered by authoritarian adults, devote long hours of concentrated attention to improving their knowledge and skill. This concentrated attention is sometimes, unfortunately, interpreted by adults as “sacrifice” in the sense of giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower one. “Dedication” and “self-motivation” would be better descriptors.

The notion that higher levels of skill do not need instruction stems from the term “director,” such as the director of a play or conductor of an orchestra. Some coaches claim the same prerogative for their advanced teams. But direction means guiding the skills of others to produce the effect the director envisions.

That in itself is teaching, and all directors, including conductors and coaches, provide a variety of instructions to their performers to accomplish what they want. That coaches at the highest level of professional sports are teachers became obvious during the 1987 National Football League strike when secondary players were hired as substitutes to play games while the stars were walking picket lines. Much commentary was made about the expert teaching abilities of various coaches.

When a coach, or conductor or director, says that he or she assumes a certain skill level and is not there to teach, I would beware that blind obedience is what is wanted, as in “I expect you to have the discipline to do what I say.” “Discipline,” however, means acting in accordance with one’s own self-imposed guidelines. It is the mark of an advanced skill. Even at an advanced level, coaches, teachers, and conductors should aim to help turn caterpillars into butterflies.

Total commitment at the expense of everything else—spending every weekend and a few week nights on one’s sport or art, because “that’s the way we do it here” or because “that’s the only way to get a scholarship”—is obsession of the stage parent type. When the commitment does not originate in the child, injury or burnout or even parental estrangement can result. Perspective on why an activity is being pursued needs always to be kept in the forefront of parents’ minds.

Tiger Mom or Stage Mom?

The recent hullabaloo over Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal article generated at least one response identifying a similar obsession in American moms. Chua, who acknowledges that her behavior is not unique to the Chinese, coerced her daughters, often punishing and shaming them in numerous and, to many Americans, shocking ways, to insure that the daughters would be the top in their classes and play the “right” musical instruments. The American version emphasizes child beauty pageants, various sports competitions, and after-school SAT courses to game the test and insure acceptance to the “right” colleges. In a previous post, I touched on the achievement-by-proxy motivation of the stage-mother syndrome. Both kinds of parental behavior go by the old-fashioned name of authoritarianism.

The “stage mother” concept illustrates the possible consequences of such an overbearing parent and the Broadway musical Gypsy eloquently dramatizes what can happen. In the musical Rose, the mom, drags her two daughters, June and Louise, from city to city to perform in vaudeville shows. Disliking the pressures of the business, June elopes. Later, as vaudeville begins to wane, Louise stumbles onto a talent for striptease, taking the name and becoming the famous Gypsy Rose Lee. The mom is devastated and in real life—the musical is based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee—becomes estranged from her two daughters for many years.

The psychological consequence of authoritarianism is either rebellion or submission. Rarely is there anything in between. In Gypsy, June and Louise reflect the former reaction to the coercion of their mother. Submission means going along, losing one’s independence and individuality, seldom being able to pursue one’s own interests because of the demands of the activity and parent. Burnout in sports is well known, usually occurring in high school after years of pressured practices, perhaps year round, that began at the age of six. Parents of these pressured kids assume that nothing is wrong, because the child seemingly goes along with all of the practices and tournaments. The parent may even claim that his or her child is having “so much fun.” An outside observer, however, may be compelled to raise an eyebrow and ask, “Is she?” Objectivity may be lost even on well-meaning parents in today’s pressure-cooker life.

There are, of course, exceptions to this overbearing parental control. My brother is a professional musician who began playing the piano at age five, gave a solo recital at age eleven, and practiced something like six hours a day in high school, at one point getting two hours of practice in before school in the morning. I don’t recall a single time in which he was forced by our parents to practice. So did his talent and drive come from our parents? No, we were a blue-collar family and our parents’ musical talent amounted to singing hymns as members of the church congregation. My brother’s motivation was all internally generated. (This is not to say that our parents were not authoritarian. They were, but in other areas of our lives.)

In addition to the strident obedience to authority that the tiger-mom, stage-mom syndrome exhibits, the values pursued are insipidly conventional. Why only piano or violin, as Amy Chua insisted? There are great tuba players in the world and they perform the great tuba concertos. Would it be so terrible if your child played the tuba? Or the banjo? Or did not want to learn a musical instrument at all? The answer is that it would be terrible . . . to the parents’ pseudo-self-esteem. And that is what this hubbub is all about.

The “right” musical instrument, the “right” sport, and the “right” college are right only if the child, not the parent, given family finances, chooses them. The parent may be consultant, cheerleader, and chauffeur, but not dictator over what the child should pursue. Independence and individuality require making one’s own choices and pursuing one’s own chosen values, sometimes in the face of opposition or expressed doubts of others. Success, accomplishment, and self-esteem all result from having done it “my way.”

Playing the “right” musical instrument, the “right” sport, or getting into the “right” college  are doing it the Jones’ way. Keeping up with the Joneses and fearing what the Joneses might think are what the tiger-mom, stage-mom parent is most concerned about. This is a prescription for dependence.

Yes, There Is Crying in Softball

In youth sports these days, a favorite refrain from adults, especially male coaches, is “There’s no crying in . . . [name the sport].” The phrase, taken from the 1992 Tom Hanks movie A League of Their Own, has even come into the vernacular with people now saying “there’s no crying in . . . [name the profession].” Certain phrases that become common can be charming, such as “where’s the beef?” or “it’s time to make the donuts,” but this one about crying is not just hurtful, its speakers are woefully unaware of psychology and the full context of the source of the phrase.

Let’s take the source first. Coach Jimmy Dugan, the Hanks character, screams criticism at one of his players for making a mistake. The player, a member of a World War II all-women’s baseball team, cries. Coach Dugan continues to scream, this time in disbelief, and recites the famous line.

A few points about this scene need to be remembered. One is that coach Dugan, who enjoys the bottle, has a less than savory character. Another is that during the screams, Doris, a character played by Rosie O’Donnell, tells the coach to leave Evelyn (the crier) alone. Then, the umpire follows up with this advice to the coach: “Treat each of these girls as you would treat your mother.” At which point the Hanks character lets out an X-rated remark to the man in blue and is promptly ejected. The scene concludes with Doris happily and proudly asserting herself by saying, “I’m in charge now.” The phrase “no crying in baseball” is hardly endorsed as admirable.

So why do so many people, especially men, like to recite this line? And why do they say it to younger and younger kids, especially nine- and ten-year-old girls, playing softball? Does no one remember the 1993 movie In The Line of Fire in which Clint Eastwood, playing a secret service agent, cries on screen? Real men, I’m tempted to say, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries do seem to cry and it seems to be okay. Why isn’t it okay for nine- and ten-year-old girls to cry?

The answer is that many men are embarrassed by crying. They see it as a sign of weakness and will do anything to avoid crying themselves, especially in front of anyone close to them, such as their wives, and certainly not in public. If they are in charge of a sports team and one of their players begins to cry, they become uncomfortable, worrying about what everyone else in the area—parents, opposing coaches, umpires—may be thinking of them. They feel compelled to do something, to fix the situation, hence the exhortations about not crying.

But crying is a sign of pain, not weakness. Striking out for the last out of the inning or making a mistake on the field can be just as painful as taking a line drive on the knee. Pain requires comforting, not rebuke. Telling anyone, especially a child, that it is wrong to feel something only encourages psychological repression, which can lead to a muted emotional life as an adult and unpleasant, angry emotions coming out at the wrong time or place.

There can be complicating factors in the situation that needs to be fixed. A shortstop or pitcher must get out on the field, but is still crying over her strikeout, and the umpire is urging the coach to keep the game moving. However, there are alternatives to rebukes and sending an upset girl to the field with the clichéd line to “shake it off.” Comforting words and a request from the umpire for thirty more seconds can do wonders for the pain of the strikeout and perhaps turn coach into a hero of a ten-year-old girl, maybe even of some of the parents in the stands.

There are also other ways of responding to the “no crying in baseball” line of coach Dugan’s. Why is it just crying that should not be a part of baseball? Why not other emotions, such as laughter or anger? I’m tempted to approach coach Dugan and say something like the following, in disbelief, of course: “Hey coach. Are you angry? . . . You’re angry?? . . .There’s no anger in baseball!”

Sports, especially the youth variety, would probably be a lot more fun if adults abided by that admonition. And if the popularity of this new phrase were to spread, we would soon be saying, “There’s no anger in business . . . or politics . . . or education!” And what about laughter, reducing the argument to the absurd? Can we not also say, “There’s no laughter in baseball!”

The point of this post is that emotions have their place in life, which includes sports. Emotions should not be denied.

On Extrinsic Motivation, Bureaucracy, and the Stage-Mother Syndrome

Carrot and stick motivation, especially the latter, as opposed to communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values, are alive and well in today’s world. The question is, why are such extrinsic sources of motivation so common? A number of reasons can be given.

For example, in the academic world of professorial tenure, faculty can almost never be fired. As a result, some administrators and chairs resort to stick tactics such as making meetings “mandatory,” providing sign-in sheets to yield evidence that faculty attended, and reciting stories like “back when I started to work in business, I said ‘yes sir!’ when the boss requested something of me.” None of these work and they certainly do not endear the administrators or chairs to faculty. In rare cases, professors have been docked a day’s pay for not attending a meeting or returning from a conference a day late. Needless to say, this tactic is even less endearing. Why do administrators and chairs feel they must wield these sticks?

The easy answer is that people tend to do what they were taught by their parents and significant others. And extrinsic, coercive methods of motivation continue to dominate our culture. But the academic world, especially the state-run university, is bureaucratic. Its management is top-down with myriad rules and regulations to guide lower-level decision making. Bureaucracy is the means by which government bureaus are run. In contrast, business management is bottom-up with policies derived from the needs and wants of paying customers and the requirements of making a profit. Employees are often viewed metaphorically as intermediate customers who perform valued services for management. Coercing and talking down to employees can lead to unhappy customers and unpleasant bottom lines. The profit motive, an extrinsic source of motivation for entrepreneurs, ironically encourages appeals to inner values in employees.

Bureaucracy encourages a legalistic, rule-bound mentality. It says, in effect, you can only do what has been codified. This leads to the generation of hundreds of thousands of rules and laws to control behavior, coupled with the impossible-to-follow proviso that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is why the bureaucratic state has become the modern form of dictatorship, a system of excessive law. A truly free society, on the other hand, says you can do whatever has not been codified, i.e., you can do whatever you choose provided you do not violate the rights of others. Rules and laws are few and they are abstract principles. Communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values become the primary means of relating to others. Intrinsic motivation is allowed to develop.

In addition to the external structure of bureaucracy as spur to extrinsic, especially stick motivation, an insecure psychology has to be another source. Local organizations, such as youth sports leagues, that issue edicts to parents that meetings or practices are mandatory, vacations are expected to be given up for sake of the sport, and games may be forfeited if a snack-bar work commitment is not met, are certainly pushing the limit of respectful communication among adults. Not that one should issue such edicts to children either.

The question is, why do the leaders of these organizations talk to other adults this way? The easy answer again is probably that they do not know better, as they have never learned alternative communication techniques. But for some the reason may be deeper, a psychological need to live the sport through one’s children to compensate for their own failings in the sport earlier in life. It is called achievement by proxy. As a result, such stage mothers or fathers—little league parents—push everyone hard, especially themselves and their children, and they brook no excuses for failing to make practice or the snack bar. Nothing is more important than the sport and they assume everyone else should have the same values. They become blind to the needs of others, especially the needs of their children.

The push for longer and longer seasons for younger and younger children, along with an apparent obliviousness to youth injuries, probably stems from this compulsive psychology. But then a similar psychology also probably operates in some (or many) bureaucrats who seem to need to prove something about themselves by issuing new edicts—new rules or laws. The more rules or laws with their names on them, the better they feel. And stick motivation seems to be all they know.

Extrinsic motivation can have its place in appropriate situations, but an excessive use of it, especially the stick part, often becomes a power trip. Appeal to inner values is the better way to go.

Caterpillars into Butterflies

I don’t know where I’ve been for the past several decades but I had never heard the expression “turning caterpillars into butterflies” used in relation to teaching. That is, until this spring when my daughter’s softball coaches used it several times to explain their goal of coaching twelve eight-and-under girls. Add to this the coaches’ commitment to “no child left behind”—meaning every girl on the team, no matter how young or inexperienced, would learn how to throw, catch, and bat or, if an older veteran, how to improve these skills—and you have a heck of a model of teaching. Winning certainly was not the only thing, and most of the girls did not seem to attach any significance to it, but winning did follow from the teaching.

So what does the metaphor mean for teaching? It is a biological process that turns caterpillars into butterflies, occurring naturally with proper nurture and a minimum of interference from predators and the elements. For teaching, this means that children are natural learners and therefore do not need to be forced to learn. They need guidance and motivation perhaps more importantly than any particular knowledge content; they need encouragement, not coercion, angry yelling, or contemptuous denigration. The goal of teaching is to build confidence in the child’s own ability to learn such that the child can continue to learn throughout life without need, or with only occasional need, of additional teaching. The butterfly knows how to fly and does not need additional “instruction” or development. A clipped wing, however, will destroy it.

Many years ago, when I was in high school, I played in an orchestra of extremely talented teenagers. (Almost all, I should say, were far more talented than I.) Several different conductors would direct us in weekly concerts. Only one knew how to get the butterflies to fly. He was a motivator of adolescents and young adults and was well liked. He would make exclamations like “Sound! I want to hear sound from you!” and “Brass, I can’t hear you!” Which to trumpeters, trombonists, and French horn players was a call to action. Not loud noise, but beautiful, controlled, and confidently self-assertive sound that made the difference between amateurishness and near professionalism.

The keyword here is “controlled,” for that is what skilled musicians exhibit—control of air stream and finger movement for wind instrument players and control of muscle movements for stringed instrument players and percussionists. Control is also what skilled athletes exhibit, in muscle movement of course, but also, as sports psychologists point out, in their thoughts about playing the game. The good motivator is the one who finds ways to make sure their students or musicians or athletes get their heads in the game and keep them there.

In contrast to the above orchestra motivator, one stern task master of a conductor succeeded in clipping the wings of the orchestral butterflies with one simple but true statement. He said, “Remember, the audience is applauding the composer as much as they are you, the performers.” Message: “don’t think you are so good.” The statement is true about audiences and, often, their standing ovations, but to say it to teenagers was utterly deflating to their developing egos. The conductor did not ask for sound and he did not get it. Was he predator or the elements? Take your pick. Demeaning comments kill confidence and a willingness to perform.

Patience is a requirement of good teaching and the passage of time is what is required for a caterpillar to pass through the chrysalis stage to turn into a butterfly. Let me conclude this post by bringing back my daughter’s softball coaches and describing their seemingly infinite patience with even the youngest, most inexperienced girl on the team, a girl who would tend to get down on herself and say “I can’t do it.” At one practice the assistant coach must have thrown thirty or forty balls to this girl for her to swing at, and with each swing she would fail to make contact. Periodically, the coach would stop to make an adjustment in her stance, then he would pitch more balls. On about the fortieth pitch . . . boom. A big pop fly went to shortstop. High fives, the coach insisted, were called for from all the other players; then he picked up the girl and said, “I don’t want to ever again hear you say that you can’t do it.”

A week or two later, the same girl made contact with the ball in a game that helped drive in winning runs. This caterpillar metamorphosed into a beautiful butterfly and that is the ultimate payoff of good teaching.