"...More Powerful, More Cruel."

Some years back, a High School coach was overheard talking to her team about the upcoming match. One of her players, a smaller underclassman who did not see much playing time through most of the season but continued to be positive throughout, listened intently as the Coach finalized the game plan. At the end of the pre game chat, the Coach looked at this younger player and told her she would be going in to serve for one of the middles. The player was so excited. Her Parents and friends in the stands would finally get to see her play!

The game started but when it was time for her to serve, the middle walked behind the service line and fired one into the net.

The player was perplexed and looked at the Coach who was deep in thought about the match.

Moments later, the middle went back to serve again. This time, thinking the Coach had just forgotten, stood up as if to sub into the match.

The Coach didn’t notice.

Finally with the game in the balance, the middle went back to serve again. Summoning up her courage, she asked the Coach if she wanted her to go in? The Coach looked down at the bench and motioned for the younger player to sit back down.

What doesn’t matter is who won or lost that game or the ones that came after. This player was crushed. The Coach had unwittingly or not, eviscerated this players confidence in both herself AND her Coach with one thoughtless gesture.

If the Coach was asked about her reversal of this young player’s fortune, she might deflect to “the player didn’t understand what I meant,” or maybe, “I just forgot,” or even still, “The match was too close to take a chance.”

Zeynap Tufekci is a Turkish born Sociologist and writer who works with the University of North Carolina. Her writings and observations on the early days of the Corona Virus eliminating the politics, non science and public hysteria led the New York Times to publish an article entitled, “How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right!” Her weekly blog is widely read and covers many different topics.

In one of her blogs from early December, she talked about her early life in Turkey. “I grew up in the aftermath of the coup in Turkey, the one in 1980, following a generation that had a lot of grim experience with some of the worst conditions of repression—jails, detention, torture. They were not just older but often seemed impossibly distant from those of us who had not lived through any of the horrors they would sometimes hint at but rarely discuss openly but not really talk about. Their words often sounded like puzzles we could not make sense of, and their advice was cryptic.”

“I remember a discussion about how one should never hope, but one also should never lose hope. I later learned that one of their defining experiences of the preceding generation was the detention period in the police headquarters. It was the worst phase—where the torture happened, and where people tried to endure and survive until they got transferred to the courts. They didn’t get justice in the courts, but they got relief from the worst. They’d see a judge and be sent to prison, which was certainly not a holiday but at least offered the relative safety of a ward with fellow prisoners.”

Then Tufekci talked about the loss of hope. “Apparently, one of the ways the torturers would try to break people during detention was to plant false hope—tomorrow you’ll be transferred, they’d promise—which, of course, didn’t happen, crushing people’s endurance in ways the horrific physical torture did not. The mind-games were more powerful, more cruel.”

It may seem like a tectonic stretch to compare the horrors of a political struggle with not being able to serve in a volleyball match, but the false hope argument is a way, intentional or not, of crushing people’s endurance.



For this player, it could be the difference between playing on in a sport she loves or quitting, being part of a positive culture or pulling away from the team, being a player who would do anything for this coach or the player who distrusts and dismisses everything they say going forward.

It's easy to get lost in the minutiae of a match and as coaches, we have all had this happen to us. But giving a player hope only to yank it away is cruelty.

Maybe this happened to you in your youth sport or school career? Imagine you are given your dream job coaching at a high level D1 job only to have the AD call you the next day and rescind the offer. How crushed would you feel.

What a Coach says to their players may be just lip service for the coach, but it can be monumental for the players. What is said must be clear, concise and most of all, UNDERSTOOD!

We can all do better at this in our everyday encounters with people, but our athletes, who we pledge to take care of, treat well and respectfully and most of all train to flourish as players AND people deserve even more of our attention to detail.