Leadership and Coaching: Ethics Should Never Be Negotiable

If you are a nerd and read this blog regularly, you’ll already know I’m ‘lawful good’. If you aren’t a nerd–that translates to ‘I put ethics and integrity above all else as a coach.’

Anyways, there are a lot of posts on the blog talking about leadership and coaching–and it’s important enough to me, it was the basis of my HOF speech (because ethics/integrity is unfortunately lagging in many programs)

There was a coaching question I read recently regarding baseball and what to do with a player that then came up in a volleyball forum. NOTE: I try and follow what coaches do across multiple sports–it’s actually really good for expanding your own philosophy and approach. With the baseball player, the student was academically ineligible because he was caught skipping class/called in sick and then went to a matinee…and posted on social media. [Not bright] With the VB player, the student was made eligible in time for the post-season and then decided to miss school for the sake of a mini-vacation with a friend, missing a practice immediately before the post-season.

With these cases, the question asked was the same in each instance: WHAT DO I DO??

As educators/coaches, we can look at this from multiple perspectives.

1 – What do the team rules say? 2 – What is school policy? 3 – Does a decision affect our ability to win? 4 – What lesson do I want to teach? 5 – What is ‘right’?

Ethics are the moral principles that govern decisions (if you want a quick/dirty definition). Morals are your standards of behavior (another simple definition).

With #1, that’s the fall back for a lot of coaches. What do our team rules say? There’s nothing wrong with this–rules are set at the start of the year and they are meant to delineate behavioral standards. But is this ALWAYS the best course? No–sometimes rules are written and siutations come up that go against the intent of the rule while following within the letter.

Example: A decade ago (coaching college), I had a policy that if you miss practice, you miss the next match unless I’m informed in advance. I added the dread phrase “No exceptions”….and then a player had her grandmother die an hour before practice and she forgot to call. Now what? The rules said no exceptions would be made, but clearly this wasn’t a kid skipping practice–this was a family situation and she’d done the right thing. Do you live by “the rules are the rules”? For me, no. I owned up to the reality that rules can’t cover everything, that in this case the rule was badly written. The team concurred and we didn’t penalize the absence. I also went thru my team rules with a fine-toothed comb after the season…if you want an example of team rules: here.

With #2, the overall rules should trump your team’s rules. Most schools have uniform rules in most instances in order to avoid parents who are lawyers (or wealthy enough to hire lawyers) getting involved if discipline is required simultaneously in multiple sports–it’s not fair a VB player gets a 20-match suspension for drinking if the BBall player with her only gets a 4-game suspension by that coach. School rules always come from the top-down, but many athletic directors will look away rather than get involved to provide coaches with discretion. In a situation as noted above–is there a problem with using the school rules as the go-to for what to do? In most situations, probably not. The only danger is as with #1–what happens when you get a situation that doesn’t fit the rules exactly?

#3…inevitably this comes up. Discipline will affect the team’s chances of winning. As a coach though, you have to decide if the rules apply to everyone or if you have “The Jordan Rules”–separate rules for your stars. I’ve seen Jordan Rules at some high schools–stretched interpretations of drinking violations to make sure football/basketball players are eligible for key games (heck…look at NCAA coach punishments for violations…Bill Self was suspended last year, but the suspension ended JUST IN TIME for him to be back for an ESPN marquee game…convenient.)

Part of coaching youth sports is teaching kids structure and the need to succeed within set rules. If you are teaching rules and teamwork and work ethic…a scoreboard does not fit into any discussion of those…so should it be part of the discussion when there’s a behavioral lapse? What do your ethics tell you? If it wasn’t a sport, but a job–and the surgeon showed up to do surgery but skipped the training seminars on the new procedure…still want him doing the cutting that morning?

#4 – What lesson is being learned? If you permit the athlete to play at all, what is the lesson being taught? Isn’t it something along the lines of “If you can chuck it 95mph with control, rules don’t apply?” Are you teaching that success on the scoreboard, the acquisition of trophies justifies shortcuts and rulebreaking? Isn’t this ‘the ends justifies the means’??

NOTE: ‘The ends justifies the means’ isn’t actually the full quote–it’s worth going to read what Machiavelli ACTUALLY wrote…because in full context, yes, the ends justifies what Machiavelli said…just not as people know the quote.

What do you want to teach–and how do you drive that home? In terms of skill development, punishment is a poor form of inculcating skill development–that’s known. But what about for making sure behavior is not repeated? Isn’t punishment important at that point to deter future poor behavior? And a question with this–are you teaching a lesson just to the culprit or are you seeking to teach a lesson to your whole classroom/team?

#5 is an uncomfortable issue. What IS right? Rules can be arbitrary and sometimes the rules are NOT right. Should rules apply equally in all situations to all people–or does it depend on a zillion other factors? Just as important–who gets to determine what is ‘right’? Is that the coach or does ‘right’ have to come from a consensus of administrators, coaches, and athletes…maybe even parents? For me, I tend to phrase it differently (and repeated elsewhere in the blog’s past): “What’s in the best interests of the young person?” Whatever answers that sincerely is the direction I will head–no matter what happens afterwards dealing with the athlete, administration, or parents.

So I mention it in a different post on ethics, but…how would I handle these situations? For me, it is black and white–presuming the details are as simple as what I gave. The athlete should be benched. Given the skipping of classes, I’d bench for an extended time–and I don’t care if it is the post-season or not.

TRUE STATEMENT: I’ve benched my starting setter for a post-season match because she overslept and missed 30 minutes of the practice before that game. When players asked, “But what if we lose?” I responded, “Then it’s a lesson learned–she should set an alarm and you, as teammates, should have woke her up before coming to practice. It’s a group failure.”

But…what if we change the story, make it less black and white. What if the student has a poor home life? What if the ONLY reason they come to school/don’t drop out is sports? Do you suspend the kid in that situation? Does it change things?

It should–that’s why each individual situation is different…but that doesn’t mean you are changing your ethics. It means your ethics, your morality, incorporates the grayness of decisions rather than trying to pigeonhole everything into a binary right/wrong framework.