Ethics In Coaching
Ethics In Coaching
Webster’s re: Ethics
- A discipline dealing with good and evil and moral duty.
- Moral principles or practice.
What It Takes To Be #1
- Commitment
- Truth
- Excellence
- Results
- Passions
- Habit
- Mental Toughness
- Discipline
Source: Walkthetalk.com
Fears in our Coaching Profession
- Professional (Coach & Players paid)
- Semi Professional (Coach paid)
- Amateur (No one paid)
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On every journey you take, you are met with options. At every fork in the road, you make a choice. These are the decisions that shape your life.
Source: Walkthetalk.com
YES OR NO ?
“As the core of the sport system, athletes must be supported in a holistic way – with care for the individual’s growth and development, physical, moral, emotional, and spiritual health.”
Sport: The Way Ahead
Minister’s Task Force on Federal Sport Policy
Ottawa, May, 1992
YES OR NO ?
Coaching at its core is an exercise in trust. Athletes depend on coaches for knowledge, guidance, inspiration and motivation. They rely on coaches to set the parameters by which athletes can strive for their best without risking injury or harm. And they count on coaches to learn what is right: both the right way to perform technically and the right way to navigate through the ethical quandaries from the overriding pressure to win.
John Dalla Costa
What are your coaching ethics?
What are your moral principles?
Are you a role model coach?
Are you a vulnerable coach?
“The price of greatness is responsibility.” Winston Churchhill
Coaching Behaviours: Your Personal Shield
Characteristics of Successful Coaches
Manning 1989
Levels of Leadership
The Role Model
Level 5 Coaches channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great team. It’s not that Level 5 Coaches have no ego or self interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious – but their ambition is first and foremost for the team, not themselves.
Characteristics of Role Model Coaches
- Passion
- Enthusiasm
- Honesty
- Flexibility
- Problem Solving
- Integrity
- Wisdom
- Courage
- .Commitment
- Patience
- Positive Attitude
- Encouragement
- Sound Judgement
- Team Player
- Respect
- Decision Making
Role Model Coaches Demonstrate Moral Principles and Ethical Prowess through:
- LEADERSHIP
- CHARACTER
- INTEGRITY
- COURAGE
LEADERSHIP
- Leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal.
- Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character.
CHARACTER
- Honesty- Loyalty –Respect
- Unselfishness
- Self Understanding and Evaluation
- Stand For Something
- Have Courage Of Your Convictions
- Class
INTEGRITY
- Honesty and Character
- Truthfulness
- Ethics
- Knowing What Is Right
- Doing What Is Right
- Managing Competing Rights
- Everything Counts
COURAGE
- Courage is being a person of good character…someone who stays true to honorable principles and noble values.
- Values Driven Means:
- Doing what’s right and taking a stand against what’s wrong.
ROLE MODEL COACH
MANDATE: To be a leader in establishing a safe environment for all players.
HOW? “Talk the talk and walk the talk.”
As a role model you will impact on the attitudes, skills, and knowledge of coaches that result in a safe, sportsmanlike environment for all players.
Young People Need Role Models – Not Critics
Some Key Thoughts…
“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
“Things turn out the best for those who make the best of the way things turn out.”
“It is what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
“You cannot live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to thank you.”
Role Model Coaches In Sport
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Hockey Canada Concerns
Top 10 Challenges/Issues The Game of Hockey Faces Today
Your Top 10- ______
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ETHICS:
The Solution to our Challenges
Knowing what is right is absolutely critical to coaching ethics, but it’s just half the battle. You see, ethics “happens” only when good beliefs lead to good behaviours.
Eric Harvey, Ethics 4 Everyone
Integrity – Based Practices
Challenge #1
Knowing what is right!
Challenge #2
Doing what is right!
Challenge #3
Managing competing rights!
Universal Ethics Principle
Ethics is displayed in everything you do – everything counts.
NCCP Code of Ethicsfor Coaches
- Respect of Athletes
- Coach Responsibly
- Integrity in Relationships
- Honouring Sport
CAC 2003: Make Ethical Decisions
M.E.D.Make Ethical Decisions
- Establish the facts of the situation
- Determine what are the issues in the situation
- Identify potential decisions that could be made and consider what might result in each case
- Identify the pros and cons of each potential decision
- Select the best option for decision
- Design an action plan to implement the decision and plan to manage the consequences
- CAC Online Evaluation
Congratulations! You are on the Radio!
You have been selected as one of Canada’s National Under 18 Coaches – indeed a coaching honour. Congrats! You will be participating in the upcoming Championships to be held in Sweden.
You have been selected to participate as a panel member in a two hour Talk Show on CBC with this topic, “ Ethics in High Performance Sport”. Other panel members include: a criminal lawyer, a parent whose daughter was injured in a hit from behind in a hockey game, a member from your provincial parliament responsible for Sport and Recreation, and a female soccer coach from a local high school.
You have two minutes to deliver your opening comments.
Record them.
Can the Game We Love Survive?
Elitism, greed, money and win-at-all-costs mentality are ruining the sport of hockey. But change is on the way.
By Jerry MacDonald
I don’t know when my love affair with hockey began, or when it ended. All I know is that the game is part of who I am. It reaches back to earliest memory, wobbling on skates three sizes too big on a black eyed lake as smooth and glossy as the paint job on a ’58 Cadillac. Ice so slick that slap shots were banned, the puck known to disappear into the blackness of the ice itself down the endless stretch of our town’s northern Ontario beach-line. Our games would last for hours, or until we ran out of pucks or froze our toes.
I was never very good, and as time skated by, it became evident that Detroit had no intention of offering me a pro contract. So I became a referee of amateur hockey, and for more than two decades the game was part of life’s apprenticeship. The sport offered lessons in humility, they are of retort, of exercising objectivity when thousands screamed at the top of their lungs that I was in need of an eye examination. It was all part of the challenge. Part of the game.
But somewhere along the line, as an official, coach, or manager of teams at various levels, I realized that something had changed. Hockey had become “organized”.
Kids were streamed – better kids playing with better kids in Rep, less talented youngsters sidelined into hours leagues. The game moved inside, and somehow the frozen ponds that developed a nation of hockey players were abandoned. Lost, too was the concept of playing for fun.
Today hockey has become an 11-month commitment for the talented 12-year-old. Schedules reach 100 games or more. There are “Best Ever” camps, hockey schools and offers of European tours during the summer. And a game that was built on hand-me-down equipment has become a $5,000 or more annual addiction for families with sons in the elitist stream, all chasing the dream of being that one kid in a thousand to make it to the NHL.
I have seen families beg, borrow and even steal to provide their gifted sons with the best hockey equipment and send them to the right hockey schools. As multimillion dollar pro contracts have grown, so have the dreams of many families that their sons could be earning six figures by age 18, a million dollars at 20. I have had ten-year-olds tell me they’ll “never be any good” because they play house league, tier two.
A generation ago most 15-year-old Canadian boys continued to play the game. Today more than 83 percent of those who start playing hockey drop out by age 15. Hockey is dying at that age level because it is no longer fun. Because it cost thousands of dollars to play. Because it is too violent. Because many of the gifted ones have played more games by the time they are 15 than the pros in hockey’s “golden years” played in their whole careers. Because if they haven’t been drafted into junior hockey by age 15-Grade IX- chances are they are “going nowhere”.
Why have we allowed this to happen to our game? And where is it headed? To find out, I spent more than two months travelling across Canada asking players, coaches, administrators and parents.
Dr. Randy Gregg runs a sports-medicine clinic in his home town of Edmonton. A lean, six-foot-four, red-haired man, in 1980 he was captain of Canada’s Olympic team in Lake Placid, N.Y. He was paid $4,000 to play for his country giving up a $150,000 contract offer from the New York Rangers. That year, he says was one of the last times he played hockey for fun and as a true sport.
Gregg didn’t come up via any elite fast track. He tried AA hockey once at 14, but he missed playing with neighbourhood friends and reverted to community-league hockey the next year. At the University of Alberta, he encountered Clare Drake, legendary coach of the Golden Bears, who helped him developed his hockey skills. He spent nine years in the NHL, eight of them with the Edmonton Oilers, and has five Stanley Cup rings to prove it.
Gregg fears hockey may be in trouble. Today’s emphasis on winning, he warns, is destroying the true meaning of why we play sports.
He tells of a ten-year-old who was brought to his clinic. The child had been checked from behind and had suffered a back injury. But Gregg couldn’t determine why the lad should be suffering the pain he said he felt. “He was a good hockey player,” says Gregg, “but small for his age – like his domineering father who was also his coach. He called his kid a ’wimp’”.
Gregg talked to the boy alone. He discovered that the child had played for more than 24 months without reprieve in regular games, tournaments, practices and hockey schools. “I asked him, ‘if I prescribe a two month rest away from organized hockey, do you think your back will get better?’ The boy thought for a moment and agreed it might.”
Gregg has many stories of young athletes pushed to the limit by parents in search of their own unfulfilled dreams. He feels sadness for what he sees as the game controlling lives. Such sadness that seven years ago he and some friends set up an organization known as Fun Team Alberta to provide a setting for kids aged five and up and their parents to play sports together for fun.
Games begin with a phone call, kids and parents meet at a rink, and everyone plays. Such a casual low cost system creates a love for playing for the sake of playing, explains Gregg. It also hones skills through positive reinforcement as opposed to criticizing mistakes.
In Quebec, Marc Beaudin would approve. He was hired to produce a program of noncompetitive recreational hockey, Hockey 2000, set up in 1989 by the Quebec Ice Hockey Federation (now Hockey Quebec). The program ensures that kids who want to play hockey for fun have a league to play in- one that guarantees fair play, quality ice time and sportsmanship. In a Hockey 2000 game, the buzzer may sound as often as every two minutes for a line change, and there’s no body-checking.
The program is thriving. Rimouski, with a population of 32, 000, for example, boasts 24 teams. A 1992 University of Montreal study of Hockey 2000’s impact found that parents were extremely happy their children were playing the game in a healthier environment, and kids were developing into good hockey players.
Six year old Nathaniel Sledz emerges from hi team’s dressing room in a rink in Edmonton. It’s Minor Hockey Week and his squad has just won the tournament. With the gold medal draped around his neck, Nathaniel is close to tears. “What’s wrong?” asks his mother, Barb “You won.”
“I know we won/” replies the boy, “but how come I didn’t get my turn?”
For Barb, a career counselor and mother of three, it was a perfect example of what’s wrong with minor hockey today. It gets far too competitive far too quickly. “My kids love hockey and they just want to play.” she says. “But sometimes I wonder what values my boys are getting from the game.”
Barb talked to Nathaniel’s coach about the lack of playing time. Winning this tournament, he replied, was a team goal. He said that it had been decided that if it came to winning or losing an important game , the team would play its best players.
Barb grudgingly accepted his comments. But she resents the priorities of minor hockey. “Pushing six-year-olds to win as the most important aspect of the sport is out of line,” she says.
Barb’s story is all too typical – and one that 44-year-old Rick Polutnik wants to change. After years of coaching, Polutnik has a new job working for Hockey Alberta, an amateur branch of the Canadian Hockey Association (CHA). At Red Deer headquarters, he runs a coaching program for Alberta’s 250 minor hockey associations. Fair play, equal ice time, stress on the values of sport – are all addressed in team and association meetings moderated by full-time facilitators.
“The game has become too demanding for hockey’s moms and dads to do it all,” says Polutnik. “they need professional coaches who will guide and support them.”
Mark Recchi of the Montreal Canadiens is a small man in what has become a giant’s game; his saving grace is finesse, speed and tenacity. A rare cut from the old school, Recchi, 29, credits his success and values to good coaching throughout his amateur career and to his parents, who never pushed.
The big change he has seen in his eight-year NHL career comes down to one word: money. It has changed players, club owners, coaches, parents, and fans. Among its casualties he believes, is respect.
“There’s a big difference now in the young guys coming into the game. In my day, you never demanded things. And there was still a great respect for the older players. Most of todays’ kids don’t appreciate what the vets have done for them in creating a path.”
Today’s million-dollar rookies are chauffeured to the rink or arrive in a $50,000 sports car. They walk into training camp wearing $1,000 suits and order the club trainer around.
That erosion of respect, Recchi believes, begins in junior hockey, where first-round NHL draft picks are put on a pedestal at age 18. Most find themselves with bank balances of up to $750,000. And they sit in a dressing room where other kids take home a $15 club allowance. An attitude develops, say Recchi. “It’s a ‘me mentality and it wasn’t there just a few years ago.”
But the biggest problem “is the pressure parents put on kids. I see it at hockey schools all the time. It’s unbelievable.”
Murray Costello is president of the CHA, an $11-million organization that oversees an increasingly complex hockey system and its 500,000 young players.
Costello admits the CHA’s powers are limited to national championships and international events. In trying to negotiate changes with thousands of minor-hockey organizations and in dealing with hardnosed hockey executives, the CHA must walk softly.
If Costello had the power, the NHL draft would be bumped back to age 21, from 18. That lower draft age alone, he says, has pressurized the system down to the peewee level (12-and 13-year-olds) and created an atmosphere for scouts, agents – and greed. “You never find the late bloomers now. That’s a shame.”
He’s also critical of what he terms the “gladiator mentality” in the sport. At one time, checks from behind, the clutch and grab, the hook and spear, and other cheap shots were unheard of. Today they are common at both amateur and pro levels.
Violence ion the ice. A “me” generation concerned with money and winning at all costs. Elitism. Athlete burnout. An erosion of respect.