April 15, 2015
At my new teaching job I gave the students an extra credit assignment that involved writing a one-page response to an episode of Spike TV’s reality show “Coaching Bad.” If you haven’t seen it, it features a group of about six coaches from various sports (including one track coach) and shows how they have serious anger issues and control issues and can be very abusive to their athletes. The host is former NFL star Ray Lewis, who tries to get the coaches to see the errors of their ways, and tries to get them to change for the better.
So I was reading through my students’ responses, when I came across a line in one of them in which the student referred to one of the coaches as a “very bad coacher.” Coacher? At first I thought it must’ve been a typo, but then I realized that this student, who had no athletic background whatsoever, assumed that “coacher” was the right word to identify someone who coaches. When I returned the papers I asked him about it, and he said “Yeah, coacher.”
I laughed, but I had to love the logic. Someone who builds is a builder. Someone who runs is a runner. Someone who hurdles is a hurdler. Someone who teaches is a teacher. So yeah, someone who coaches is a coacher.
If you get a chance to catch an episode of the show, it would be worth your while. I’m not sure which night of the week it comes on, but back episodes can be viewed on the SpikeTV website. I can only take watching it in small doses myself, because there’s way too much rage and hostility being passed around for my liking. But I know that one of my students, who plays a varsity sport, really appreciated the assignment and told me he could relate to some of the scenes on a personal level.
I’ve never been a screamer in my life as a coacher, so it’s interesting to see how vehemently the screamers on the show believe that their tactics are effective. I don’t get it really. But I suppose everyone bases their style on how they were coached.
