The article explores the long-lasting impacts of authoritarian coaching on recovering athletes, highlighting their emotional struggles stemming from childhood sports experiences. Many were treated as mere tools for achieving success rather than as individuals with autonomy and self-worth. The negative culture of fear, humiliation, and a lack of personal expression under strict coaching regimes created significant psychological challenges for these athletes, whose abilities to make personal choices were consistently suppressed. This authoritarian model appears widely across various sports and levels, contributing to a common yet harmful narrative in athletic development.
As I discussed in an earlier post, athletes were typically treated as performing bodies-means to an end in the service of wins, records, medals, and the coach's reputation-not as human beings endowed with their own capabilities of reason and freedom.
I want to pause and dig into this authoritarian coaching model of seizing control over the lives of young people by creating an environment of fear, as this has turned out to be such a consistent theme in recovering athletes' stories that it has emerged as a kind of playbook, used across sports, across different levels (from intermediate to elite), and across countries.
First of all, "fear" is really too soft of a term to describe what many athletes experienced daily during their childhoods and young adulthoods in sports. These athletes were terrified -a term I consistently heard in our conversations.
Their own abilities to deliberate and make choices about their own safety, well-being, personal boundaries, values, and goals were denied and suppressed. Head coaches had absolute authority, and they often ruled by instilling fear in athletes.
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