In the eighth grade, my friend Fantasia practically screamed Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball” for three weeks straight on our way home from school. In case you’ve forgotten, the earworm goes like this:
Basketball is my favorite sport
I like the way they dribble up and down the court
Just like I’m the King on the microphone so is Dr. J and Moses Malone
I like Slam dunks take me to the hoop
My favorite play is the alley-oop
Basketball was, in fact, not my favorite sport, but all I ever did with Fantasia was play it. If she wasn’t playing it, she was talking and singing about it (guess which one I hated more). My incessant exposure to her obsession supplanted my common sense and before I knew it I was signing up to join the girl’s basketball team. I was taller than 85% of the girls in my grade, including Fantasia, and I am pretty sure that is the only reason Coach Kutz so vehemently dragged me onto the court with a smile of triumph. He was thrilled to label me a shooting guard and throw me to wolves without remotely explaining what a shooting guard was.
Honestly, I never understood why I joined or stayed with the Lady Eagles for as long as I did. Social exchange theory posits that individuals make decisions based on a rational calculation of the benefits and costs associated with a particular choice, and they aim to maximize their overall rewards while minimizing their losses (Gruman et al., 2016). I can remember negotiating with Fantasia to never sing that song again if I agreed to join the team. Being new to the school, I anticipated the rewards as being able to bond with potential friends outside of school, expanding my friend circle, and gaining some social approval I could cash in during high school since the social hierarchy of this school appeared dominated by all the sports team members. In general, I had been convinced by the coach and other students that my height was advantageous and made me a natural. I thus anticipated recognition, praise, and a sense of accomplishment. And I was wrong.
Unfortunately, the team had communication and dynamic issues from the start. In fact, the social dimension of the team was so adverse that several fights between our own teammates broke out on the court during games. Sports research literature, such as Weiss et al., (2021), highlights numerous social-cognitive-developmental theories that provide valuable frameworks for understanding the outcomes associated with youth sports participation, including why my teammates fought like cats. We can begin by looking at the motivational climate of Coach Kutz’s team, which describes how the social environment in sports, encompassing practices and competitions, is constructed to define and interpret competence and success (Kim & Cruz, 2016). These motivational climates are often classified as task-involving or ego-involving; task-involving climates focus on effort, improvement, and personal mastery and ego-involving climates emphasize social comparison and performance outcomes. Coach Kutz practiced very authoritarian leadership with a strong emphasis on discipline, structure, and winning, often at the expense of individual player development and a positive team culture. Honestly, he was the John Kreese of basketball. The foreground of his coaching style was control and normative evaluation, which tends to create ego-involving climates (2016). In multiple sports, higher ego-involved peer climates evaluated during the early season are associated with reduced task and team cohesion at the midseason stage among players aged 10 to 17 years (2021). This is exactly what occurred for the Lady Eagles.
During the first set of practices, Coach Kutz made it clear how he would manage us as a team. He frequently compared players to one another and prioritized projected or existing rankings to “motivate” us to be better. This meant girls who’d played basketball for five minutes were being compared to girls who’d played for five years. Coach Kutz claimed to be challenging me to be the best version of myself, but I got the feeling he really just wanted me to be Jessica or Tabitha so he could win whatever bet he was putting on our team’s season average. After the first game, Coach Kutz picked his favorites and stopped caring about the development of his weaker players. His neglect really festered in some of the more competitive girls. During games, the pressurizing atmosphere created the perfect conditions for those emotions to explode into brawls after someone missed a pass, or even accidentally brushed a girl after she’d failed a shot.
Hanin (1992) explains four main communication styles in sports teams: 1). orientation messages, which involve planning strategy or technique and are typically exchanged before a performance; 2). stimulation messages serve to motivate and energize teammates during a performance; 3). evaluation messages allow the team to reflect on their performance and identify areas for improvement; 4). task-irrelevant messages which are any other forms of communication that do not directly relate to the task at hand. The Lady Eagles often failed as a team because we lacked effective orientation messages with Coach Kutz’s authoritarian and win-at-all-costs coaching style overshadowing strategic discussions. We didn’t have positive stimulation messages other than watching him yell “That’s my girl!” to individuals who scored points or blocked a shot. Sickly enough, his cutting us down only made us want his approval more. Our evaluation messages were reduced to simple peer comparisons that damaged our self-esteem and fostered resentment toward each other, especially amongst the higher-performing players. It’s obvious that Coach Kutz exacerbated conflicts and hindered effective team communication, but aside from dismissing him as a coach, what could have been better?
Had the Lady Eagles been framed as a social and not a severe caste system then Jessica may not have lost a tooth to Fantasia’s fist. Had Coach Kutz created an environment where we could have discussed the conflicts and the impact of comparisons on team cohesion then maybe Megan wouldn’t have whipped the basketball at Samantha’s head. Had he taken the time to explain to me my role as a shooting guard then maybe I wouldn’t have kicked my shoe into the audience. Does any of this sound familiar? In essence, the Lady Eagles were a dysfunctional family and the children were at their brink. Surprisingly, “we’re more than a team, we’re a family” is more than a sports cliche. Russel (1996) states that because families and sports teams have analogous features both can suffer some similar issues of conflict resolution, role clarification, group unity, etc. Therefore, family therapy methods could have remediated our team. An intervention for us would have involved acknowledging our poor team functioning as a consequence of our coach’s favoritism and player comparisons and addressing the emotional burden of the team (1996).
As you can imagine, I experienced burnout from playing basketball under Coach Kutz’s leadership and I did not sign up for summer basketball camp. For the first few weeks after the season, when Fantasia asked me to play basketball I’d throw her stupid ball onto her house’s roof. Fantasia joined Lady Eagles the following year because she’s a maniac. After my experience, the closest thing I ever did to a school sport was somersault into the library each time high school coaches approached me in the hall. As for Coach Kutz, I like to think he had an intervention of his own.
Citations
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2016). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. SAGE Publications.
Kim, H., & Cruz, A. B. (2016). The influence of coaches’ leadership styles on athletes’ satisfaction and team cohesion: A meta-analytic approach. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 11(6), 900–909. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747954116676117
Russell, W. D. (1996). The Utility of Family Therapy in the Field of Sport Psychology. Family Therapy, 23(1), 37. https://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/utility-family-therapy-field-sport-psychology/docview/1474314654/se-2
Weiss, M. R., Moehnke, H. J., & Kipp, L. E. (2021). A united front: Coach and teammate motivational climate and team cohesion among female adolescent athletes. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 16(4), 875–885. https://doi.org/10.1177/17479541211006905
Tags: #AppliedSocialPsychology, #basketball, #sportspsychology, sports