DORRANCE – TOO GOOD FOR HIS OWN GOOD?

Sexual harassment may seem like a strange topic on The Soccer Column, but the Anson Dorrance sexual harassment trial, scheduled to take place April 7th of 2008, is a strange case indeed. I provide a link to the details of the case and an old summary judgment in favor of Dorrance, which has since been rejected on appeal, thus the trial date.

http://www.sog.unc.edu/pubs/electronicversions/slb/slbfal04/article3.pdf

The case reveals that not only did the coaching staff appear to condone under-aged drinking, flippant sexual behavior and banter by their players, but that they also responded to or participated in the banter from time to time. Perhaps more damning is that they appear to have inquired, both informally and formally, about the sexual activity of their players on a regular basis, in a context from which a player could interpret that a refusal to respond/participate would put her at a competitive disadvantage to those teammates who did.

How Much Should You Get to Know Your Players?

Looking back on my personal experience in male team sports, my coaches did not engage in these kinds of personal discussions with players. I don’t recall a coach ever asking me about my sexual exploits in college – not that I would have had much to tell him. I doubt that I would have been offended if my coach had asked generally how things were going with me personally (they did not). I wouldn’t have told him anything – I was never one to feel that a coach was supposed to be my friend – but I don’t believe I would have taken offense to the question.

I also don't think that, if I had been asked about my sex life, I would have extrapolated that, if I reveal myself more to this guy, maybe I’ll gain an advantage over the other midfielders in the team…maybe he’ll cut me some slack in practice, if he knows I’ve been wandering the Sahara Desert, so to speak. More likely, I would have been more offended that my coach thinks I’m on the verge of becoming a eunuch, or that he thinks such inquiries pass for coaching.

I’ll let the court decide if Jennings has to demonstrate that similarly prudent team members, who performed as poorly as she did both athletically and academically, received similar treatment – or if the mere actions of the coaches constitute a hostile environment for which she should be compensated, but it is the coaching question that applies to this column.

The Case for Dorrance as a Coach

I once suggested, in a team website editorial years ago, that Anson Dorrance would be a good candidate for the US Men’s national team, because of his record of success, and his psychological acumen. He consistently extracted superior performance from his players. (Originally, he was the men's coach at UNC, then doubled up as the women's coach as well, before dropping the men's program to focus on the Lady Heels.) In particular, I was fascinated with Dorrance’s ability to both keep women extremely competitive in training, and still foster an atmosphere of camaraderie and team spirit.

In an ESPN SportsCentury program, Mia Hamm described the liberating effect the atmosphere in the women’s soccer program at UNC had on her athletic performance and her personal growth. In particular she talked about how in her childhood she often felt apologetic about her competitiveness, whereas at UNC it was encouraged – even required. Dorrance used an explicit point system where players’ micro-competitive results in training were scored, and at the end of the week the players with the highest points for their positions were in the starting eleven.

It comes as no surprise that coaches evaluate a player's performance throughout the week, and come to a general conclusion about their place in the starting 11. But the knowledge that every single competitive encounter in training is recorded and used to evaluate who plays and who doesn’t, would likely create a steel-caged death match atmosphere in a men’s team. You might not have anyone survive long enough to reach the matches. However, on the evidence of UNC’s success, perhaps it merely created optimal competitive aggression in training with women.

Some would suggest that in women you generally have to raise the level of competitive aggression to get better performance, whereas in men it’s already there, and needs only to be channeled. Other men’s sports don’t support this theory – American football teams regularly beat the hell out of each other 5-6 days a week, only to unleash their fury on their opponents at the week-end. Infighting is often encouraged by coaches – a bit like fight dogs so keyed up by the time they’re unleashed for an actual fight, they’re likely to kill anything in their path, much less another dog.

I think the key to training women is to have the same end-game as you would with men, but perhaps you arrive at it by a different path.

Separately Hamm also painted a picture of a heightened sense of camaraderie at UNC and in the national team, and how she felt comfortable excelling individually because it was encouraged by the coaches. Her teammates reacted positively to her success, rather than resenting it. Her success was in the context of team success, which the coaches made sure they all sought. Perhaps this was the result of just recruiting like-minded competitive women, bringing them together and being evaluating them objectively from week to week, rather than subjectively choosing when to cajole one player, while hammering another. But even in Hamm’s case that doesn’t tell the whole story.

In the national team Hamm often went to her coaches crestfallen that she hadn’t scored in a few games, buckling under the weight of expectation for her to excel. Dorrance, DiCicco, Foudy and Akers all had to constantly reassure her that she was allowed to have an occasional dip in form from time to time – in other words her competitive instincts had to be controlled. I doubt many male athletes would go to their coaches asking to be benched because they weren’t performing – most would probably hope the coach hadn’t noticed. Most would resent being benched even if they knew they were under-performing, such is the so-called male ego.

Sports Psychology by Gender

Sports psychology is a funny thing – stranger still when comparing men to women. On the face of it, there would seem to be a double standard: if Roy Williams takes a interest knowing the personal lives of his basketball players at UNC, he is lauded. But when Anson Dorrance does it to the girls at UNC, some how he’s a disgusting letch, damn-near a pedophile, and is violating their civil rights. However, there’s a big difference here.

While I’m sure Williams knows who his players are dating and what they do in their spare time, I doubt he’d be dumb enough to openly discuss a player’s proclivities in a shoot around, or bring it up in an official player evaluation. Certainly he’d have the good sense to do it privately, just in case the player doesn’t want to discuss it in front of his teammates. And it's one thing to know who your players are dating, and another to keep tabs on who they're having sex with!Furthermore, alluding to the “my coach is my best friend” phenomenon – very few successful coaches of men are of this philosophy. They may show they care in the way a father will, from time to time, but they rarely cross the line into intimate details of the personal life unless it manifestly affects performance (e.g. Billy Ray hasn’t hit any 3-pointers since he found out his girlfriend is pregnant).

For the most part, while coaches of men want their players to feel comfortable coming to them with problems/issues, they will rarely directly ask about the who’s, what’s and where’s of their personal life. They'd much rather spy on their players from afar. First of all, if they don’t hear what they don’t want to hear, directly from the player, there’s plausible deniability for any wrongdoing. Furthermore, most men respond positively to some measure of fear of their leaders, and too much intimacy might sacrifice a coach’s ability to scare the piss out of his boys from time to time.

But does this same psychology work for women? Is there a mutual lowering of the walls between the coach/player relationship required to bring the best out of women to an extent, or in a way that would either backfire with a male athlete. With men, would it make them feel like the equal of their coach, and thus less likely to do as he’s told? Do men respond better to the father figure than women, and as such, is Dorrance’s friend/mentor approach more palatable to his female athletes? Is it a competitive advantage? Is the sexual harassment case against him an incidental result of an overall winning formula for women, or an unacceptable breach of the “in loco parentis” covenant between parents and universities?

Am I a sexist just for asking the question?

Coaching Girls vs Boys

Before you say yes to the previous question, I should mention that I know a (very) little bit about coaching women. Now, full disclosure - yesterday, Anson Dorrance forgot more than I'll ever know about coaching women - there's absolutely nothing I know that he doesn't. I first became interested in Dorrance during the summer of my sophomore year in college when I coached both teams and individual training sessions, mostly in technique, but plenty of fitness as well.

I found that the overwhelming majority of my clients were the parents of girls dissatisfied with the coaching they were getting. While the parents of boys were equally loyal customers, I got much more unsolicited positive feedback from the parents of girls. It seemed to me that parents of boys simply took my training methods, and the level of expectation I had for the trainee, to be normal. There were some exceptions.

A few rich parents with ill-tempered boys, loved to watch me drop the hammer them. (Frankly I always found that to be a bit pathetic – I mean, no coach could drop the hammer on me as hard as my own father, and if any of them ever wanted to scare me straight all they’d have to do was tell my father I was messing about at training.)

But the parents of girls seemed to go buck wild over my sessions – not because I treated girls appreciably differently, but because I treated them appreciably the same as boys. I never allowed any non-soccer related banter of any kind during training. I treated side-conversations as a sign personal disrespect to me, and kicked more than one player out of a session that wouldn’t concentrate – it didn’t take long before everyone (including the offender) fell in line. I also never backed down from telling a girl that she was lollygagging, and I didn’t ask her to pick it up either – she either did or she’d go do the Cooper test, or got the hell out of the session.

I had one parent, before I trained her team, ask me not to get “cutesy” with her girls – I assumed she meant she wanted me to be tough on them. “No problem,” I said. 2 weeks later, she came back to me and asked me to let up a little – through gritted teeth I agreed. But soon enough, a couple of girls came to me and asked why I wasn’t pushing them any more, and it was back to business as usual.

I had read a few articles about Dorrance at the time, and recall his pontifications on the differences between the psychologies of male athletes and female athletes. I found his thoughts to be insightful, but I didn’t buy them entirely and made no genuine attempts to emulate him. If I had, maybe I'd have had a career in coaching!

I knew only one way, and whether coaching boys or girls, my sessions were efficiently executed (I started on-time, had few breaks and stayed on a schedule until the hour or two was up), and I didn’t change my exercises in any way whether I was coaching girls or boys. But maybe this wasn't what Dorrance was talking about.

I did, however notice a few glaring unintended differences in the way I both interacted with and coached boys and girls. My conclusions with both were always the same, but the way I reached them often differed significantly.

Coaching to the Same End, by a Different Path

For example, in shooting the fundamentals don’t change by gender. To hit a powerful and accurate shot, foot speed and an optimal point of contact on the surface of the ball (i.e. the sweet spot) are critical. Foot speed is usually sought by swinging harder at the ball, but this often sacrifices control, because at higher speeds, it’s more difficult to hit the sweet spot.

To combine these two concepts, you can achieve foot speed through continuous weight transfer through the point of contact (i.e. keep your body moving forward through the strike), while simultaneously not swinging your foot as hard, making it easier to hit the sweet spot.

Typically boys and girls differed in technical errors in their shot. Boys tended to do everything too hard and too fast – weight transfer was rarely a problem, but accuracy often was, so my instruction was to swing half as hard, find the sweet spot, then through muscle memory, keep hitting the sweet spot, but simply accelerate through the strike.

Girls tended to be timid on their shots – they didn’t seem to have much momentum at all at the point of contact. So I would encourage them to focus on landing on the shooting foot, after the shot, thereby transferring their weight forward through the strike, and generating more foot speed. Because they don’t swing as hard anyway, it’s easier to hit the sweet spot either way, but the added weight of their momentum makes the shot more powerful and accurate.

The point is this most girls I trained preferred to be treated strictly as an athlete and responded positively to being asked to train hard (very hard) or suffer the consequences. More than one parent came to me and commented on their girl's sudden manifestations of a new competitiveness. Psychologically, I could invent theories that shooting is an innately aggressive act, and if boys tend to be over aggressive in shooting, it is because boys are naturally more aggressive while girls are innately more timid, and their tendency is to under-hit their shots.

Frankly, none of this matters much to a good coach – a good coach evaluates each individual player, boy or girl, aggressive or timid, competitive or needing nurturing, perfectionist or sloppy, and appropriately deals with each side of each dichotomy. A mistake would be to assume that because you’re coaching a girl, she’s timid – let her show that she’s either timid or aggressive, and coach her accordingly.

The Hubris of Victory

Perhaps the biggest problem with the Dorrance sexual harassment case, from the coaching perspective, was that treating all his players through the prism of his own psychological acumen (and his success as a coach would certainly support this) may have cost him a chance to coach Jennings differently, and in a way that would have served them both a little better.

Dorrance has had, in 28 years in charge of UNC, a .930 winning percentage – an unbelievable success rate in any sport for either gender. Perhaps in getting it right 9 out of 10 times for 28 years, he developed a hubris that colored his perception of his own behavior, and that of his assistants. I’m sure if the parents of his girls’ players were video taping his training sessions, he wouldn’t have been asking who was Jenning’s shagging out loud. I don’t know whether this alone rises to the level of sexual harassment, but it’s pretty clear that Jennings was that 1 out of 10 that he got dead wrong.

It is more than mildly ironic that the man who may have done more to make use of Title IX than any coach in America, through his success as both a college and WNT coach, could very well have put his career in jeopardy by virtue of his own success. While his coaching method that may have worked 9 out of 10 times, that 10th time may cost him his career – and what a career it’s been.