Abstract
The coach plays a key role in making sports an educational experience for the youth who participate. The movie Race showed that though there may be a Hollywood stereotype of the macho coach, the ideal movie coach is supportive of his players, including emotionally supportive. On the other hand, the abusive, egomaniacal coach in Varsity Blues highlights how important all the stakeholders in high school sports are in promoting—or protesting—a culture of “winning is the only thing.” Coach, parents, players, the community at large—all need to be reeducated to sports’ educational agenda. Both films illustrate ethical dilemmas sometimes found in other educational settings: the temptation to win at all costs and to exploit players for vicarious fulfillment.
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Notes
- 1.
For one version of Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success,” see https://www.thewoodeneffect.com/pyramid-of-success
- 2.
For the difference in the portrayal of coaches between Hollywood/major studio and independent films, see Jolly and Lyle (2016).
- 3.
One characteristic which often differentiates coaches in educational settings from those in business is that in business coaches almost always come from outside the organization, whereas sports coaches rarely do. Coach Carter is one exception.
- 4.
See their website www.coachfederation.org
- 5.
I will not address the policy issue of whether too much money is given to sports programs at the expense of other educational endeavors. That question is occasionally addressed in the movies. In Mr. Holland’s Opus, for example , when the School Board drops all the high school arts programs because of a budget deficit, Mr. Holland challenges them to close the football program instead of his music department.
- 6.
Michael Haselkorn once summarized the life lesson value of sports as “Competitive sports prepare you for life’s two great challenges: losing and winning.” Another popular formulation is “Learning to win fairly and lose honorably.”
- 7.
Indeed, the number of unpaid, volunteer coaches may be very large, for example, the entire Little League baseball enterprise, among many other amateur sports networks.
- 8.
My high school water polo coach was an art teacher during the regular school day and coached only after school. John Wooden saw himself as a high school English teacher until the end of his days, because for him literature was a character-building subject. See note 10, below.
- 9.
The track equivalent of Dunn’s boxing adage, “Tough isn’t enough.”
- 10.
Perhaps the screenwriters have been reading their John Wooden : “Some observers felt that our players had top physical Condition. That was only part of it. They also had top mental and moral Condition. I reminded them, the players, of their responsibility to achieve Condition with this little rhyme: ‘There is a choice you have to make/In everything you do./So keep in mind that in the end,/The choice you make, makes you.’ If you make the right choices you will achieve Condition.” http://www.conversationagent.com/2016/08/john-wooden-on-values-victory-and-peace-of-mind.html
- 11.
There are other examples of Snyder’s implicit racial bias, for example, in the first interview, he says “Your mama may have taught you how to dress right [itself a taunt, as Snyder had already denigrated the jacket Jesse’s mother had labored to make for him], but she sure as hell didn’t teach you anything about manners. You should look a man in the eye when he’s speakin’ to you.”
- 12.
Many Hollywood coaches have abandoned long-term personal relationships, for example, Coach Carter and Coach Dale in Hoosiers . In Titans, Coach Yoast’s nine-year-old daughter reports: “In Virginia, high school football is a way of life; it’s bigger than Christmas Day. My daddy coached in Alexandria, he worked so hard my Momma left him, but I stayed with coach. He needed me on that field.” The same is true for dedicated school-based educators. In Worst Years (Chap. 7) both the cruel principal and the empathic homeroom teacher are divorced. Even when a coach’s nuclear family remains intact, relocation may be the price they pay for a losing season (as in Friday Night Lights).
- 13.
For a taste of the debate over whether talent or hard work accounts for success, see “The 10,000-Hour Rule ” in Gladwell (2008).
- 14.
Ditto macho principals as in Lean on Me , about the radical makeover of an inner -city high school . At his first faculty meeting, Principal Joe Clark declares, “No one talks in my meetings. No one! … Forget about the way it used to be. It’s not a damn democracy. We’re in a state of emergency and my word is law! There’s only one boss in this place, and it’s me!” In the next section, Mead (2016) will judge the coach in Hoosiers to be a model of transformational coaching. But in his first, macho phase, the coach uses the same kind of authoritarian language: “What I say when it comes to this basketball team is the law, absolutely and without discussion.”
- 15.
Compare Claire’s advice to Jamal in Forrester (in Chap. 2), about his playing college basketball even though it is to “the White man’s” benefit: “Maybe you both get what you want.”
- 16.
Was “higher knees and shorter strides” indeed a coaching innovation of the first part of the twentieth century? Only sports historians will know. Nonetheless, it is a given in contemporary movies about that period. That is the professional advice of Sam Mussabini, the private track coach whom Harold Abrams hires in Chariots of Fire (1981, another film based on true events), to prepare him for the 1924 Olympics: “Remember, over-striding. Death for the sprinter.”
- 17.
That same psychological dimension is behind Snyder’s quick aside to another runner who apologizes to him for losing a race : “Sorry, coach. I was sure I had him beat.” To which Snyder responds, “That’s probably why you lost.”
- 18.
Quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “Success is peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you’re capable.” See note 1.
- 19.
Contrast this with the autocratic music teacher in Whiplash who commands the new student to appear at the next morning’s practice at 6:30 a.m. sharp, when practice does not really begin until 9:00 a.m. The student is terrified when he oversleeps; disoriented when he rushes to the rehearsal hall, only to find it empty; and disheartened as he waits two and a half hours until others show up.
- 20.
Based on the synopsis in Sight & Sound 9(8), 1999, pp. 54–55.
- 21.
For a close analysis of other high school football films see Hills on Titans and Bulman (2005) on Varsity Blues.
- 22.
For an analysis of the full range of such abuses, see Kerr et al. (2016). Varsity Blues was included in their sample of 19 films.
- 23.
M$B opens with Dunn’s best fighter leaving him for a different manager who promptly gets him a title fight, which he wins.
- 24.
See School Ties , The Perfect Score , and The Emperor’s Club.
- 25.
Cheaters and Stand and Deliver (both based on true stories), Election and (again) The Emperor’s Club.
- 26.
Jesse’s reaction is a mix of both the principled—“you gotta give em a shot,” in response to Marty’s pained outburst, “You mean we came all the way here and we’re not going to race ?”—and the practical: “I’ve never even ran the relay. I don’t even think I know how to pass the baton.”
- 27.
The same practical, rather than ethical, approach characterizes Snyder’s discussion with Jesse about his fling with Quincella. There, too, the scene opens with Snyder noticing the bad press the affair is generating.
- 28.
Indeed, in that era Blacks and Jews felt their fates intertwined in facing bigotry in American society . The film overlooks the fact that in the early 1930s some Nazi ideologues took inspiration from American Jim Crow laws. See Whitman (2017).
- 29.
Their long discussion on this matter is worth watching (begins approximately 1:50:00). Evidently Snyder summoned Jesse to the talk. The straw which breaks Jesse’s resolve to fight anti-Semitism is Snyder’s sharing with him a newspaper clipping he had saved since the 1900 Paris Olympics, with the headline “Kranzlein Wins Four Gold Medals at the Paris Olympic Games.”
- 30.
When a surgeon is surprised by the huge amount of scar tissue he had to remove from the star quarterback’s knee effectively ending his playing career, Kilmer lies and says he did not know anything about the knee problems. By contrast, the hero coach in Hoosiers has an injured player in the big game. When his wound opens up, the coach wants him to keep playing and orders the trainer to “fix him up” despite the trainer’s protests . The coach then thinks better of himself and decides in the player’s best interest and pulls him. This being Hollywood, the weak second-string substitute makes the difficult shot to win the game.
- 31.
Some screenwriters prefer black and white . The screenplay for Dead Poets Society won an Oscar (1990) for best original screenplay. The movie’s hero , John Keating , is still regarded by many as an example of an outstanding teacher , partly because the school principal and the key parent were painted as unredeemed villains . Nonetheless, Keating’s subversive actions were unethical and borderline negligent . Unethical because, as a graduate of the school he has just returned to teach in, he certainly knew it to be the ultimate institution of oppressive acculturation, like all private schools in the movies. When he was hired, the administration reasonably assumed he was returning to his alma mater to advance its ethos and goals. But Keating’s plan from the beginning was to push for individuation by creating freethinkers (as we saw in Chap. 3). It was unethical for Keating to deliberately and deceitfully subvert the school’s ethos. On the charge of educational negligence, Keating supposedly had much experience with teenagers. Yet, when his student-protégé, Neil, comes to his office for guidance on how to escape the oppression of his tyrannical father, Keating did not recognize the depths of his despair, even though he was crying as he said, “I’m trapped.” Keating tells Neil that he must talk with his father, but Neil responds that “It’s hopeless.” The next day, Keating asks Neil, “Did you talk to your father?” When Neil replies “Yes,” Keating should have suspected that might be untrue. Keating never contacts the father to intercede on Neil’s behalf, or at least clarify the situation. Thus, Keating bears some of the responsibility for Neil’s desperate suicide (with his father’s gun), though viewers may differ on exactly how much responsibility. Because the screenwriter painted the father as an ogre, he tilts us toward “none.”
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Barry Chazan and Jon Levisohn for their helpful comments on this chapter and to Rachel Resnick for her help.
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Resnick, D. (2018). Sports Coach as Educator. In: Representing Education in Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59929-2_4
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