I kept avoiding this topic – but after a new story coming out, I have to rant.<\/p>\n
It makes me sad about what is said on the court of play.\u00a0 Coaches and players alike – but it is the coaches who have been spotlighted.\u00a0 And rightfully so – they should be the ones who are showing a bit of decorum.\u00a0 And instead are acting like schoolyard bullies.<\/p>\n
First, there was the story about Michigan State and Tom Izzo during a timeout got so angry at Aaron Henry, that he started berating him on the court and had to be restrained by coaches and players multiple times from continuing to get in the player’s face.\u00a0 Afterwards, he showed no remorse.\u00a0 Here were his quotes from the press conference (sourced from ESPN)<\/p>\n
What’s wrong with challenging a kid that makes some mistakes?\u00a0 Aaron Henry — trust me — did some things that you can’t do as a starter on a top-5 team at the end of your freshman year. They were effort-related.\u00a0 I did get after him. He did respond. He did make a couple of big buckets. He did make some big free throws but that’s not good enough. It’s one-and-done time. The ‘my-bads’ are out the window.”<\/p>\n
Then, when continued to be asked about it, he said, “I get a kick out of you guys get[ing] after somebody because you\u2019re trying to hold them accountable.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what kind of business you\u2019re in, but I tell you what, if I was a head of a newspaper, and you didn\u2019t do your job, you\u2019d be held accountable. That\u2019s the way it is.”<\/p>\n
So, lets put a couple things straight for Coach Izzo.\u00a0 First of all, as the NCAA constantly reminds us, these are student-athletes.\u00a0 You are not running a business (or otherwise, your employees are not being paid – well, at least as far as we know).\u00a0 I totally understand getting upset in the heat of the moment.\u00a0 I totally understand wanting to make sure that they learn from their mistakes.\u00a0 But are you seriously trying to tell me the only way that you can do it is to lay your hand on him, start wagging your finger in his face, lunge at him multiple times all while verbally abusing him with words that I could not put on this blog.\u00a0 You are being paid an amazing amount of money to coach a game – and you can’t figure out a better way to get your point across than that.<\/p>\n
But lets get to his point to the press.\u00a0 Because here is where he is wrong as well.\u00a0 If he worked as the head of a newspaper or any other industry, and in order to hold his employee accountable for a mistake, he verbally assaulted and phyiscally threatened that employee until others came and separated them, he would likely not be the head of that newspaper or company for much longer.\u00a0 He definitely would be spending a lot of time with HR as they hold him accountable.<\/p>\n
To add to Coach Izzo, in the next game against Minnesota, as they were up 20 points, you heard the announcer say, Coach Izzo never stops no matter what the score – you can hear him yelling at the official about a missed call in a game his team is winning by 20 points.\u00a0 And right after that, when his team turned the ball over, you could see him turn around in anger and slam both of his fists into the scorer’s table.\u00a0 IN A GAME HIS TEAM IS WINNING BY 20 POINTS!\u00a0 \u00a0But this is acceptable, because he is such a good coach………<\/p>\n
That type of reaction is simply not acceptable in any part of our society – so why is it acceptable of a head coach who is supposed to be a role model for these students.\u00a0 I hear reactions from former players saying that people are growing too soft – a coach is\u00a0 no longer allowed to yell at their players.\u00a0 And anyone who has coached, including myself, (whether professional or youth sports) has probably had a moment (or several) where they have yelled at a player or a ref to get their attention because they were angry or upset at something (although admittedly, while yelling is not great, there is a difference between yelling about a bad play or call and being so upset that people have to restrain you from physically attacking someone).\u00a0 Regardless, competition does not always bring out the best in us.\u00a0 So, I was considering giving Coach Izzo a pass in my ranting of the blog.<\/p>\n
But then I read this article about the UC-Irvine coach Russell Turner.\u00a0 The questions started when the press noticed him get confronted by Oregon’s player Louis King in the handshake line, and them linger in conversation.<\/p>\n
He admitted at this point that he tried to rattle the Oregon player by calling him “Queen” and he had encouraged all his players to call him Queen on the court.\u00a0 “Double team Queen”.\u00a0 We were calling him that because we knew it would irritate him and maybe throw him off his game.\u00a0 Turner claimed that it was a sign of respect – that he was likening King’s importance to the importance of a queen in chess.<\/p>\n
But lets be honest, none of us are going to get rattled because we were called the name of a chess piece.\u00a0 He knew that they were saying an insult that was questioning his masculinity or sexuality – either way, something totally unacceptable.\u00a0 How is that in any sense of the imagination acceptable coaching – to be telling your players to verbally say things that unacceptable to irritate the opposing team.\u00a0 This coach literally told his players to display horrible sportsmanship in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage – he should be suspended for those actions.\u00a0 At a minimum, the referees should have given him a technical foul for his words.\u00a0 Coaches can not taunt opposing players – and it is mind-blowing that this coach thought it was acceptable to tell his players to also taunt that opposing player.<\/p>\n
Whatever happened to sportsmanship.\u00a0 Whatever happened to referees calling technical fouls for sportsmanship.\u00a0 And then that leads me to be sad to think what is being said on the court – since if that type of trash talk was coming from both players and coaches towards a player, and it didn’t draw the referee’s attention to call a technical foul, how bad does the trash talking really get (and sadly the answer is much worse than what I have mentioned in this blog post).<\/p>\n
It becomes acceptable because it is simply part of the game.\u00a0 Well, I needed to go on this rant because as Coach Izzo said – we need to hold people accountable.\u00a0 There is no place in the game for this – and coaches everywhere at every level need to be helping us enforce this.\u00a0 \u00a0At a minimum, they definitely can not be the ones encouraging this horrible behavior.\u00a0 But until coaches like Izzo and Turner realize that their actions promote this lack of sportsmanship, the game will still be full of these bad stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I kept avoiding this topic – but after a new story coming out, I have to rant. It makes me sad about what is said on the court of play.\u00a0 Coaches and players alike – but it is the coaches who have been spotlighted.\u00a0 And rightfully so – they should be the ones who are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1593"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1596,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593\/revisions\/1596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}