Written by Katie Alexander.

I had the opportunity to interact with many coaches during my time participating in elite sport. While some of these coaches were great, I remember the bad ones the most.

When I was a young athlete, I had a coach that would send me to stand “in the weeds” during games if he was disappointed in my performance. He would also yell at me and publicly humiliate me in front of the entire team. Some of my other coaches often commented on my physical appearance and my playing style, with one of my written evaluations from them, even saying that I was “too short to play competitively” and “too ugly of a player.”

Another coach split the team up into “A,” “B,” and “C” teams and did not allow the “A” and “C” teams to interact because the lower-ranked “C” team would “contaminate” the better players. I was placed on the “C” team and was often forced to practice on my own, sit in the stands during games, and miss major team meetings. The coach hardly uttered a word to me, and he often ignored certain players for months. Although I still keep in touch with many of my good coaches, the memories of these negative interactions have stuck around with me for far longer than expected.

Athletes often face exploitation, and abuse within the context of sport can take many forms. While instances of physical and sexual abuse often receive extensive media coverage, a more prevalent form of abuse has perpetuated across the sporting domain. Emotional abuse has been normalized within our current culture of sport and this form of exploitation is unacceptable.

Many coaches may engage in emotionally abusive behaviors under the guise of “winning at all costs,” but these behaviors are inappropriate and often harm athletes. Could you imagine a boss that throws objects or publicly degrades workers for the sake of increasing productivity in the workplace? These types of behaviors would not be acceptable in an office setting, in a romantic or familial relationship, in the military or armed forces, or in any other setting, so why should they be allowed in athletics? 

What is Emotional Abuse?

Emotional abuse within the context of sport can be difficult to define, and the existing research literature uses varying definitions of this form of abuse. Other names for it include mental or psychological abuse, and it appears to be very similar to bullying. Here is a definition that has been proposed by the research literature:

“Emotional abuse is a pattern of deliberate non-contact behaviors by a person with a critical relationship role that is potentially harmful, including spurning, terrorizing, exploiting, and denying emotional responsiveness and potentially harming a person’s affective, behavioral, cognitive, or physical wellbeing (1).”

Behaviors associated with Emotional Abuse 

This form of abuse is best understood through various types of behaviors. Three potential behaviors related to emotional abuse include physical behaviors, verbal behaviors, and denial of attention and support (1). Other categories of abusive behaviors include belittling, humiliating, shouting, scapegoating, rejecting, isolating, threatening, and ignoring (2).

Examples of Emotional Abuse in Athletics

Before writing this article, I realized that very little research has been done to study emotional abuse within elite women’s sports. I decided to create a short informal questionnaire about negative coach-athlete relationships, and the results are rather shocking. I think that showcasing some of the polling results alongside examples of emotional abuse would best highlight the current and pervasive issue within sports. 

Demographics and Context 

103 women participated in this informal questionnaire, with the majority being between the ages of 18 and 23 years. A vast array of sports was represented, including swimming, rowing, soccer, field hockey, softball, acrobatics, volleyball, lacrosse, basketball, gymnastics, triathlon, track and field, ice hockey, cross country, tennis, springboard diving, cheerleading, and golf. Participants had a diverse range of experiences, and most had participated in competitive-level athletics. 90.3 % had been on a club or travel team for their primary sport, 83.5 % had participated in high school athletics for their primary sport, and 77.6 % (have or had) been involved in collegiate athletics.

Participants were asked to think of a single coach at the participant’s most elite level of participation that influenced them greatly. They were asked to reflect on questions with this coach in mind. 51.5 % said that the coach was male, and 48.5 % said that the coach was female. For each question, participants could choose between “strongly disagree,” “disagree,” “agree,” and “strongly agree.” Individuals could also choose to share additional information about their experiences with an open-ended response at the end of the poll. 

Examples of Emotional Abuse 

Here are some potential examples of emotional abuse:

Physical behaviors: throwing objects at players or demonstrating any form of violence.

“My coach frequently made me run more, belittled me, threw clipboards at me, and really impacted my confidence as an athlete” (15).

“When [she was] angry, she would walk out on us, throw clipboards, jump and scream, call out specific people, and play favorites. She was caught by school resource officers getting into her players’ faces and screaming at them in the bathroom” (26).

“…He pinched and punched us, but said it was play fighting and we would leave with bruises…” (30).

Verbal behaviors include yelling, belittling, name-calling, degrading comments, humiliation, scapegoating, rejecting, isolating, and threatening. 

“…this coach yelled at me in front of my team and everyone in the bleachers during a time-out at a game. [She yelled] ‘you’re going to sit the bench your junior year.’ She would single me out and criticize every single thing I did and say it all in front of my teammates” (4).

“She made me feel stupid my entire college career. Although I was always a starter, she told me I sucked throughout my 4 years there. I completely lost confidence in myself and went into a depression” (3).

“I was a scholarship kid on a very wealthy AAU basketball team. My coach held my scholarship over my head and treated me as if my scholarship and position on the team was always on the line…” (15). 

Denial of attention and support: ignoring players or excluding them from events.

“My current coach selects favorites [sic] and ignores and avoids others…” (6).

“When I was 15, I was very injured. My coach ignored me for months until I got better. He believes injuries are fake and made me feel worthless” (9). 

There are also other behaviors that are not well studied within the current research literature that may also occur across women’s athletics. Here are some examples of behaviors that may also be categorized as psychological abuse:

• The coach states that they do not have an “open-door” policy for athletes and refuse to interact with players outside of designated practice or game times.

• Rather than being invested in you as an individual, the coach instead focuses on your accomplishments and accolades. 

“Not sure how common this is at different levels, but I had a coach tell certain players that their only role on the team was to be a GPA booster. These girls never played or saw the field because the coaches only wanted them to boost the team’s GPA” (25).

• The coach has unrealistic expectations and issues harsh punishments for not meeting these expectations. 

“She doesn’t realize that we’re doing our best and makes it known our best isn’t good enough for her” (7).

“My coach would consistently boast how her athletes would push themselves very hard on workouts and would therefore vomit. She said it was a good thing for us to be vomiting. She was already having us workout 2-4 times a day and in order to keep up with these expectations with vomiting, I would force myself to vomit after I did poorly on workouts” (8). 

“We’ve been forced to run for small mistakes, degraded after games because we didn’t put up enough stats.. We were called handicap, a space cadet. My coach literally had me draw a diagram that showed I was in the trench of failure and I had to draw a stick figure as me. Then I had to draw a mountain and label it the mountain of success…” (11).

• The coach constantly makes comments about the weight and physical appearance of players. 

“I’ve had a coach in the past who made us weigh ourselves every week and write down our weight on a board in the locker room where everyone could see it. He didn’t let us eat bread when we were traveling…” (14).

“At the age of 10, she told us to have food logs to show her because ‘a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips…’” (17).

• The coach encourages you to come back too early from an injury or to play through an injury. 

“…Coaches question my ‘resiliency’ and commitment to the team because of injuries that they thought I should be back sooner for like concussions. I’ve been told by a coach that I should talk to a therapist so next time I get a concussion I can return to practicing faster” (14).

“I wasn’t okay for months mentally while also battling a spinal fracture that I was pressured to play through” (19). 

• The coach states that he or she doesn’t care about the athletes or the wellbeing of players.

“I’m pretty sure my coach only let me on the team to just have numbers and to make sure she wasn’t losing any more players…She [my coach] would be nice to my face, but she actually just wanted to use me for my connections on campus (I was an RA and on the programming board)… I was just there as a number because girls kept quitting left and right” (13).

• The coach divides the team up by “rank” or another means to split up teammates. Higher-ranking players are discouraged from interacting with lower-ranking players, even outside of practices and games. This may also impact the culture of the team. 

“…She would have one person stand in the middle and we would say everything we didn’t like about that person before we could get into the pool” (17).

“The coach I had in mind during this survey used to tell us she liked to play mental games with us. She would force teammates to lie and manipulate each other during practices such as cheating the score, ignoring each other, and making fun of one another. It made us all uncomfortable and we hated doing it but felt we had no choice…” (19).

“Sometimes he will even run two completely different sessions for the two groups – with one deliberately designed to ‘punish’ those he doesn’t like. It’s really demoralizing for those in that group as he tells us the other group is preparing them for certain competitions that he thinks the rest of us won’t qualify for. I’ve been in the ‘bad’ group, having already qualified for the competition he says they’re preparing for” (20).

“…She enjoyed playing mind games with us all and it negatively affected how we played” (32).

One final sign of emotional abuse in athletics includes the rapport between coaches and players. Although players may occasionally be nervous around their coaches due to performance expectations, players should not feel uncomfortable or uneasy around their coaches.

“I have had 7 personal meetings with my coach over the past three years and have left every single meeting feeling discouraged, on the verge of tears, and prepared to leave my sport…” (18). 

“Many of us don’t feel comfortable trying to better ourselves around him for the fear of being called out or punished for messing up. He continually singles out players he doesn’t like and makes their experience miserable until they decide to quit” (22). 

Conclusion

These findings certainly warrant further investigation into the scope and outlook of emotional abuse in women’s athletics.  Coaches truly have the power to impact athletes in both negative and positive ways. Although this influence is apparent to many athletes, coaches may not understand the lasting impact that they can have on players. Negative interactions can especially have a range of adverse consequences for athletes, so NO coach should be allowed to emotionally abuse players. 

Big leagues and organizations MUST acknowledge that emotional abuse is a widespread problem in athletics, and better checks and balances must be developed to ensure that this form of abuse is being prevented. Very few sporting organizations have clear guidelines for reporting emotional abuse, and female athletes are often ignored or invalidated when trying to report abuse: 

“No one believes the athlete’s story. This isolation and invalidation continue until the athlete quits. Rarely is there a good outcome” (24). 

“…We contacted our agents, president of the club, and no one listened. We were told to tough it out. It was the feeling of this is your only chance to play at this high level and you should appreciate it. Every year, someone had a mental breakdown, serious injury, and we weren’t performing” (27).

“I played under a terrible coach at the high school level and many people wanted him gone. There were petitions, school board meetings, etc. to get him gone. But he was present for all of it. He was there when people went to talk about him, and our emails were not anonymous. So, it made people feel as though they could not speak out against him without losing their starting spots and a few girls [even] went and spoke decently about him because they wanted spots…” (28).

In addition, athletes and parents must be taught to recognize the signs of emotional abuse. Furthermore, coaching behaviors may not always be interpreted as helpful or supportive, and coaches must understand emotionally abusive behaviors and must be taught better ways of interacting with players that don’t include these types of interactions. I also hope that researchers will also take an interest in negative coach-player interactions so that we can better understand the current situation.

Athletes, you are NOT alone in your negative coaching experiences.

I would argue that most female athletes experience at least one “mean” or “bad” coach in their sporting career, and these athletes likely feel isolated or stuck in these horrible situations. In many of these cases, coaches aim to make the athlete feel powerless or to silence them through harsh tactics. I want to let you know that you have the power to leave the situation, to ban together with your teammates to try to make a change, to simply reach out to loved ones or counselors to share your stories, or to overcome these experiences. Emotional abuse is UNACCEPTABLE, and you don’t have to stay silent about these experiences.

References and Personal Stories 

The first two are references to journal articles. I also want to include most responses from the open-ended section that gave participants the opportunity to share more about their experiences in sport anonymously. 

1 Stirling, Ashley & Kerr, Gretchen. (2008). Defining and categorizing emotional abuse in sport. European Journal of Sport Science, 8 (4), 173-181. https://doi.org/10.1080/17461390802086281.

2 Gervis, M. & Dunn, N. (2004). The emotional abuse of elite child athletes by their coaches. Child Abuse Review, 13, 215-223. https://doi.org/10.1002/car.843. 

3 “My college coach claimed & preaches that she cares about a healthy culture and continues to use that as a recruiting technique. Unfortunately, the only thing that was good about our team culture was the team itself, not including our coach. She made me feel stupid my entire college career. Although I was always a starter, she told me I sucked throughout my 4 years there. I completely lost confidence in myself and went into a depression. Multiple girls on the team felt the same way and were also depressed. Our assistant coaches approached her on this topic and she basically said that’s how she is & it won’t change.”

4 “During summer league basketball, I was going into my junior year of HS, this coach yelled at me in front of my team, and everyone in the bleachers during a time-out at a game ‘you’re going to sit the bench your junior year.’ She would single me out and criticize every single thing I did and say it all in front of my teammates. Constructive criticism is very different from straight up criticism, this coach made negative comments to me all the time and almost made me lose my love for the game.”

5 “My coach excessively uses favoritism to create her lineup. If you don’t play your freshman year, you most likely will not play your entire career here. She does the bare minimum on checking in on us. I have had teammates having mental health issues and they are too afraid to go talk to her about how she is negatively affecting them.”

6 “My current coach selects favourites and ignores and avoids others. I had surgery in the summer and when we came back my coach made me feel bad that I wasn’t able to do everything at a high level and wasn’t as fast.”

7 “She doesn’t realize that we’re doing our best, and makes it known our best isn’t good enough for her. It takes the pressure cooker we live in and amps it all the way up…she is single handedly contributing to my teams growing hate and dread for the sport we’ve happily given our lives to.”

8 “My coach would consistently boast how her athletes would push themselves very hard on workouts and would therefore vomit. She said it was a good thing for us to be vomiting. She was already having us workout 2-4 times a day and in order to keep up with these expectations with vomiting, I would force myself to vomit after I did poorly on workouts. She knew about this but rather than be supportive she punished me for having a “bad attitude”.”

9 “When I was 15 I was very injured. My coach ignored me for months until I got better. He believes injuries are fake and made me feel worthless.”

10 “My assistant coach and I had a post-season meeting and I told her one of my goals for the spring season (which was to make the top boat) and her immediate response was “Well, you know there are a lot of strong girls who are probably going to beat you, so you’re going to have to figure out a plan B and not set the standard so high for yourself.”

11 “My coach has obviously degraded my class in particular while choosing to ignore how we are treated. We’ve been forced to run for small mistakes, degraded after games because we didn’t put up enough stats (even when only 2 people in our class actually played), we were called handicap, a space cadet. My coach literally had me draw a diagram that showed I was in the trench of failure and I had to draw a stick figure as me. Then I had to draw a mountain and label it the mountain of success….. I’ve grown greatly from my experiences with this coach and have been able to cultivate a better relationship, but the treatment she shows to our class is obviously beyond our control and unnecessary. This occurs when other players are coddled and treated gentler because we’ve had so many players quit in the past.”

12 “I decided to quit because of the drama I didn’t fit in with the team dynamic and it was an extremely toxic environment. I also had this coach for 2 years. I was young the first year and he told me I was not going to get much playtime. I understood but soon felt disrespected and under appreciated. I would outperform other players but I never was seen as a valuable player in his eyes. I didn’t realize the impact of constantly feeling worthless had on me until I started therapy this year.”

13 “I’m pretty sure my coach only let me on the team to just have numbers and to make sure she wasn’t losing anymore players. I quickly realized that my coach was not interested in actually teaching me the sport. She gave up on me; and I didn’t understand because I had to learn so quickly. Practices weren’t really a time for me to learn, it was expected I pick everything up as soon as I step on the field. I did what I could off the field to be the best player I could be; but it was still hard without someone being able to point out the little things. My coach ignored me when she realized I really wasn’t going to be a benefit of the team, and then would talk to other players about me, making them not want to help me or be my friend. I became frustrated and angry with myself and the situation, which wasn’t a good look because my coach just thought I had an attitude. It was just weird that this coach let me on the team knowing I had no experience, and then expected the world of me. She was nice to my face, but she actually just wanted to use me for my connections on campus (I was an RA and on the programming board). I was the water girl, I was asked to warm up the goalie on the sideline during games, and when something was left in the locker room, I was the one asked to get it. I was just there as a number, because girls kept quitting left and right. I wish I had an experience that let me get closer to my teammates, but it was hard when they wouldn’t even look at me on or off the field.”

14 “I’ve had a coach in the past who made us weigh ourselves every week and write down our weight on a board in the locker room where everyone could see it and he didn’t let us eat bread when we were traveling. Also, generally coaches question my “resiliency” and commitment to the team because of injuries that they thought I should be back sooner like concussions. I’ve been told by a coach that I should talk to a therapist so next time I get a concussion I can return to practicing faster. Also, I’ve had a few training coaches who because someone is not strong enough for their standards decide to show them less attention and make them feel pretty bad about it, sometimes humiliated in front of the whole team.”

15 “I was a scholarship kid on a very wealthy AAU basketball team. My coach held my scholarship over my head and treated me as if my scholarship and position on the team was always on the line. My coach shared my financial situation with some of my teammates and this resulted in being isolated and bullied. My coach frequently made me run more, belittled me, threw clipboards at me and really impacted my confidence as an athlete.”

16 “My coach would play favorites by offering scholarships (not college scholarships club scholarships while we were in high school) to players as a way to bribe them to stay on the team. They also only cared about the outcomes of the games and not player development. They wouldn’t belittle you directly but would make snarky comments or not acknowledge players.” 

17 “At the age of 10, she told us to have food logs to show her because ‘a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips’. She would have one person stand in the middle and we would say everything we didn’t like about that person before we could get into the pool. She threatened to send me to the hospital because I looked so disgusting and small when I was just naturally a smaller athlete.”

18 “I have had 7 personal meetings with my coach over the past three years and have left every single meeting feeling discouraged, on the verge of tears, and prepared to leave my sport. My coach consistently recruits new players and clearly states to the team that these new players are better than them and it’s not even worth trying to improve, the new player will play over the old ones. I have developed an obsessive workout regime to try and increase my fitness in order to attempt to impress my coach, but still get ridiculed for being small.”

19 “The coach I had in mind during this survey used to tell us she liked to play mental games with us. She would force teammates to lie and manipulate each other during practices such as cheating the score, ignoring each other, and making fun of one another. It made us all uncomfortable and we hated doing it but felt we had no choice. Fortunately, myself and the other seniors took time to talk to the team and clear up any frustrations amongst the players, but we never had the chance to talk to our coach. She would call us mentally weak and after a loss told us we liked to “hike up our skirts and take it.” We brought it to the admins attention, and nothing was done. As a senior I did everything I could to shelter the younger players from her psychotic coaching and manipulation but that meant taking the heat of it myself. I wasn’t okay for months mentally while also battling a spinal fracture that I was pressured to play through. Thankfully they fired her after that season because we threatened a team strike and wouldn’t play for her. I’m graduated and gone but I still keep in close contact with the team and they are doing so much better now that they have a positive and encouraging coach working for them.”

20 “He has very clear favourites and treats them differently. Sometimes he will even run two completely different sessions for the two groups – with one deliberately designed to ‘punish’ those he doesn’t like. It’s really demoralising for those in that group as he tells us the other group is preparing them for certain competitions that he thinks the rest of us won’t qualify for. I’ve been in the ‘bad’ group, having already qualified for the competition he says they’re preparing for. I’ve walked out of his sessions early numerous times, often in tears.”

21 “My high school private and academy tennis coach constantly talked about believing in myself and how much he cared about me as a person and an athlete. His actions did not reflect this and if I did poorly at a tournament it was all my fault for not training hard enough even though I was training 6+ hrs a day.”

22 “Many of us don’t feel comfortable trying to better ourselves around him for the fear of being called out or punished for messing up. He continually singles out players he doesn’t like and makes their experience miserable until they decide to quit.”

23 “When an athlete is uncertain of what or how to do an exercise in the weight room, a target is placed on their back (typically one athlete or one group of athletes in particular). They are no longer good enough, talented enough, or fast enough (whether they were to begin with or not).”

24 “No one believes the athlete’s story. This isolation and invalidation continues until the athlete quits. Rarely is there a good outcome.”

25 “Not sure how common this is at different levels, but I had a coach tell certain players that their only role on the team was to be a GPA booster. These girls never played or saw the field because the coaches only wanted them to boost the team’s GPA. These girls could’ve played elsewhere but they were brainwashed into only worrying about having a good GPA, and if they struggled with it then they felt like they were failures.”

26 “A new coach had come into play, [sic] she was nothing like my old coach. When angry she would walk out on us, throw clipboards, jump and scream, call out specific people and play favorites. She was caught by school resource officers getting into her players faces and screaming at them in the bathroom. She would talk about players behind their backs and encouraged a divide amongst the team. I was particularly targeted, she never liked me. She would always stick me on the sideline and tell me ‘you just don’t have it’”. A teammate had sprained an ankle during a match and coach told her she was faking her pain and made her continue to play. The team culture was extremely toxic, and cliquey.”

27 “We were overworked, stressed, anxious, lost weight, hair, and missed periods. We contacted our agents, president of the club, and no one listened. We were told to tough it out. It was the feeling of this is your only chance to play at this high level and you should appreciate it. Every year, someone had a mental breakdown, serious injury, and we weren’t performing.”

28 “I played under a terrible coach at the high school level and many people wanted him gone, there were petitions, school board meetings, etc to get him gone. But he was present for all of it. He was there when people went to talk about him and sending emails were not anonymous. So it made people feel as though they could not speak out against him without losing their starting spots and a few girls went and spoke decently about him because they wanted spots. He belittled girls for not being at a certain club, wouldn’t play them either, constantly blamed individuals for losing a game [sic] things like that. Wouldn’t play college commits. Favored players obviously and hated on others just as bad. But we were never given the opportunity to talk about how we felt without him knowing (he’s still coaching there). He ruined the sport for MANY people who played for him at the high school. Even parents showed their distaste. Schools across the state knew how terrible he is. There’s a lot wrong with the school when dealing with things like that so it’s not a surprise but the further pushing of schools to listen to players when speaking out against people in authority positions needs to be done.”

29 “If I didn’t perform to her liking, she would frequently cuss me out, punish me with insane conditioning assignments that often made girls throw up, or completely ignore me and make me work out without a coach. I had many injuries because of her poor coaching and punishments, and on the rare occasions that I felt comfortable enough to tell her about them, she did not believe me and made me keep working, which made the injuries worse. In addition, she would talk negatively about me to college coaches and did not give me the support that I needed in order to make it to the college level. Luckily, I made it onto a college team and I am very happy, but I always think about what more I could have achieved if I had a better coach.”

30 “This coach, upon us not performing to the wanted standard (3rd [place] instead of 1st) on the first day of the competition, ignored us for the rest, resulting in even worse results as we had no guidance. He kicked me out of the practice room for crying during a session and swore at me and told me never to come back. He pinched and punched us, but said it was play fighting and we would leave with bruises. He made comments about the high school relationships I was in and disallowed me from talking to my boyfriend (who was in the same club as me) at competitions and if I did, he would ignore me for the rest of the day and I would be reprimanded after the competition and told how he was a distraction and would stop me from achieving my goals.”

31 “Ignored clear signs of depression from multiple players, one who ended up attempting suicide and didn’t seem to care until after the athlete attempted to take her life. She had her favorites and she showed heavy favoritism and belittled or ignored her other players.”

32 “My coach would talk behind other player’s backs when we had individual meetings with her and make promises for playing time but would never follow through with them. She enjoyed playing mind games with us all and it negatively affected how we played.”

33 “My coach had favorites and if you weren’t the favorite you didn’t matter and it was obvious. My coach would continuously call the same pitches without regard that I was in so much pain. I couldn’t even turn my wrist to start my car or open a door. I lost my spot on the field because I couldn’t do my job because of how much pain I was in and my coach didn’t even notice; he was mad at me for not doing what I was told to do.”

34 “When I was 16, I was put into a group where I was one of the youngest athletes. I was extremely bullied by the older athletes, and at one point I couldn’t go to practice anymore because I was scared. I texted my coach multiple paragraphs about how I didn’t feel safe at practice. He read it, never responded, and still to this day refuses to acknowledge that I said anything at all.”

The following quotes reflect the behaviors of great coaches: 

35 “My coach was incredible. When I had an eating disorder freshman year, he sat me down and told me that ‘I don’t ever care if you don’t run again. I want you to be healthy. If there’s no joy right now in running, I can’t let you run until you have joy in it again.’ He kept to his word and made sure that I was physically, mentally and emotionally sound before I was allowed to race again. He constantly checks in on everyone’s health both mentally and physically, and sends everyone personalized training and emails to check in. He is accepting of every athlete and was one of the first people I came out to as gay. He truly loves all of his athletes, and at the end of every year he has a story for each of them and celebrates everyone equally. I am so thankful everyday that he is such a loving and incredible coach and has guided me this far in my career.” 

36 “I had this GK coach since I was 15. A very influential time period for most girls that age [sic]. And it was one of the ONLY times I could say I’ve experienced a positive coaching influence on me toward soccer and life. I still keep in touch with him today, he’s my go-to coach to vent to about the awful coaches I’ve had since I left the club he coached at (especially the college coaches I experienced). It seems to me that unless they’ve experienced the pain, narcissism, or burn-out that we (as players) have, they won’t have compassion or think twice about the words/actions they conduct. He did, and it’s what helped me get through the hardest (soccer) times of my life.”

37 “I was never just an athlete with this coach. I was always a student and human being first. This was the first coach that truly accommodated my injuries and things that arose in my personal life, like the death of a friend. After consistently being out with injuries, I was not expected to be back training at the same level as my teammates, and that was what ultimately kept me healthy. When I needed to take the GRE, I was told to just practice after I took it and not think twice about scheduling interviews for grad school. When I had terrible performances, I was met with compassion, and when I had great performances, I was met with enthusiasm.”

38 “I am so lucky to have a coach who cares about performance in sport and also outside of sport. He is always open to conversation and is knowledgeable about all problems teenage athletes can face and how to support that – I feel privileged for this!”

39 “This coach brought me back to my sport in college after I quit in high school because I was burnt out. She always met me where I was at mentally and physically and respected my boundaries. For example, she would suggest at the start of practice that I try to complete a new dive for the first time. If I told her I wasn’t comfortable doing that yet, she’d wait a while before she asked again. She also would listen to why I was nervous to attempt a new dive and would try to help walk me through it. I’d never had a coach be that patient before. Especially not at the higher levels. I also noticed how she treated her elite divers who were in high school and was in awe. When one of them wiped out on a dive or came too close to the board she would let take a break so they could process and regroup. She also would help rebuild their confidence when attempting that dive again in the future and would never push until they were ready. Coaches I’d had in the past were not nearly so understanding and part of why I had quit in high school. I can’t ever say how thankful I am to this coach for helping me love diving again and help me build up my skill set. When the pandemic is over I’ll be right back in the pool with her, despite being an adult with a job. Not only did she rekindle my love but I’ve gained so many dives that I never thought I’d be able to do. It reminded me why I loved this sport as a child.”

40 “My club coach growing up was in my opinion the best coach a girl could ask for. He cared about more than just swimming, but about how we could apply those transferable skills to life outside the pool. He helped me to push my limits and coached me in a collaborative way as a late teen that worked really well for me. He believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself and even on days when I didn’t think I could complete a set he pushed me to do it (in a strong but kind way – not in an abusive way like I’ve seen other coaches do). His coaching style and overall support is a big reason why I qualified for Olympic Trials!”

41 “My coach helped me and so many of my teammates fall back in love with softball after some negative experiences in high school. In junior college you don’t expect a full college experience, but as alumni my teammates and I constantly talk about how these were the best years of our entire lives. We grew to be strong independent women all working to support each other on and off the field.”

42 “My previous tennis coach was amazing. She was so kind, humble and inspiring. She really pushed us to be the best we could be on and off the tennis courts. She cared about our academics, our clubs and activities, and our mental health. She was the first person to notice when my mental health started to slip. Even when I tried to push her away, she didn’t let me. She was the one who pushed me to get help for my disordered eating. She never once shamed me or invalidated me. She was my biggest advocate. Without her, I don’t know if I would be alive, let alone able to play tennis. I aspire to be like her.”

Read about finding your power as a female athlete here: https://viragoproject.org/where-to-find-your-power-value-athletic-advice-to-a-younger-me/. 

Any additional comments, questions, or concerns? Feel free to contact the writer, Katie Alexander, at katie.alexander738@gmail.com.