Lower Your Voice and Raise the Level....

It started this week with an e mail from a player in Savannah, Georgia who was in a camp I had done over the summer. When asked how her club season was going, she said, “It’s awful. All our coach does is yell and scream and curse at us. I don’t even want to go to practice anymore.”

She’s in eighth grade.

Chatting with a coaching friend on Wednesday, she said one of her players came up to her on their court amidst several other courts of activity and said, “That coach on the court next to us, the one that keeps screaming, is making me uncomfortable.”

Is this what’s next for those coaches?

It’s baffling to understand why some coaches feel it necessary to yell and scream at their players and teams. In an article for SmartClassroomManagement.com, Michael Linsin says that teachers will yell at their students for one or more of the following reasons:

1. They don’t know a better way.
2. They don’t trust their classroom management plan.
3. They don’t enforce their classroom rules each and every time.
4. They take poor student behavior personally and feel the need to scold.
5. It works initially (though the effect lessens over time and comes at a high cost).

What makes it even more baffling is how those coaches would feel if THEY were getting yelled at in heir work place. In fact, CareerBuilder.com polled workers to find out what it is that fills them with workplace-related angst. The top answer? Getting yelled at by the boss, 26%! 

As has been argued for decades, if yelling is the best teaching tool, then kindergartens and first, second and third grade class rooms would be full of screaming teachers. Is it like that where your daughter or son goes to school?

On a personal front, raise your hand if you like being yelled at…… You mean you don’t like to be the center of negative attention, be belittled in front of peers and disrespected? Huh…go figure!

Alan Goldberg puts out a website titled Competitive Edge. In a recent post, Goldberg talks about yelling. He writes, “There’s an odd belief in parenting and coaching circles today that by somehow raising your voice more, the message that you’re trying to deliver will be better received. You know, the louder you speak, the easier it goes in. Unfortunately, the opposite is more frequently true. Yelling at kids usually distracts them from the game, turns them off to the sport and shuts them down, performance-wise. Coaches who yell at their athletes during games are off base. Contrary to what you may see on TV, yelling is not the best way to motivate your child-athlete to scale new performance heights.”

Emotion can often overtake a coach, at practice or during a match but as a coach, you have some things you can do.

First, do you have a coaching philosophy in place that when called upon during the trying times can help lead you in the right direction. Be the coach that lives with their philosophy and won’t abandon it at the expense of some rough patches during a long season.

Do you have a sounding board? An assistant coach or a team Captain you can ask whether or not your behavior and demeanor is acceptable or not.

Finally, do you fully understand that you are coaching a sport that is incredibly random, that is based on decisions made in fractions of seconds and skills that require years to master?

It’s also not so out of place to remember the “golden rule” when coaching, and asking yourself if YOU would be comfortable being coached by you in these moments. Would you be okay being yelled at, berated and made to feel small?

One of the great pieces of advice Hugh McCutcheon, the most successful U.S. Coach in Olympic history said recently was, “If you yell all the time, how will they know when you really are angry?”