Rutgers University fired its men’s basketball coach, Mike Rice, earlier this year after a video that became an online sensation showed him physically and verbally abusing his players during practice sessions.
Rice kicked, pushed, and threw basketballs at his players while simultaneously bombarding them with profane, misogynistic, and homophobic language.
Since Rice’s firing, media attention has shifted away from his behavior to the failure of Rutgers officials who knew about the video in November 2012 to dismiss him at that time. Unfortunately, this shift in focus has diverted attention from two important issues, namely, whether Rice’s behavior was unacceptable and, if so, how to prevent other coaches from acting similarly.
For me, the behavior Rice exhibited on the video was indeed unacceptable. Admittedly, sports practices feature a more informal atmosphere than exists in a classroom, so judging coaches and professors by an identical standard would be unfair to coaches. Periodically, it may be necessary for a coach to touch a player so as to direct the player to a particular spot on the field or court; it is surely not necessary to do that to help a student understand a literary classic or a work of political philosophy. Sometimes, a coach may even have to raise his or her voice so as to convey a sense of urgency to a complacent or distracted college athlete.
But even when measured by this informal standard, Mike Rice’s behavior is unacceptable. Coaching, after all, is teaching, and effective teaching rejects throwing objects at students, screaming profanities at them, and subjecting them to misogynistic or homophobic slurs. Instead, effective teaching emphasizes showing, not telling (and certainly not screaming). Had Rice spent more time showing his players how to run their offense and play their defense, and less time berating them for their mistakes, they may well have won more games and he would likely still have a job.
But although most of the blame for Mike Rice’s misbehavior rests with him, the college sports industry is at fault, too. As colleges have come to depend on athletics as a source of revenue and visibility, some coaches have begun to view themselves as executives in an entertainment industry governed by the morals of the marketplace instead of as teachers in a university governed by academic values, including respect for all students and encouragement of their efforts, not condemnation of their errors.
Still, perhaps something positive will emerge from this episode. On a national level, maybe it will remind both producers and consumers of college sports that grave consequences inevitably flow from assigning games more importance than they deserve. Closer to home, perhaps it will remind parents to demand, and educational leaders to ensure, that abusive coaches are not tolerated in school or community sports programs in Vermont and New Hampshire.
