Coaching Styles: More Than W’s and L’s

There was a time not so very long ago when coaches were asked only to win more games than they lost. How they managed this tricky little mission was entirely up to them.

Some cajoled their teams. Some screamed at them. Some pleaded. Some threatened. Intimidation or accommodation. The bottom line--W’s and L’s--was what mattered most.

No more.

There is a suspicion among college coaches gathered for the Final Four that, in the aftermath of Lou Campanelli’s mid-season dismissal at California, their business has become less concerned with substance than with style. And that disturbs them.

Campanelli was fired for dealing harshly with his student-athletes, actually yelling at them. His experience shook his comrades. Perhaps Billy Tubbs of Oklahoma put it best, saying, “Now, if you throw a clipboard in a dressing room, you might get in trouble.”

Locker room screaming is standard stuff for some coaches. ‘Sometimes,” Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski said, “you might do something to create emotion, create a conflict so that the team comes together as one.”

Was that what Campanelli was up to when Cal athletic director Bob Bockrath overheard some major league bombast and decided to fire the coach?

And if that was Campanelli’s agenda, was it a proper technique? The coaches think that’s nobody’s business but their own, part of their roles in the care and development of their teams and players.

George Raveling of USC thinks there is nothing wrong with a little well-placed discipline. “My mother cussed at me,” he said. “If she were alive, she’d be doing 15 to 20 at Attica for the beatings she gave me.”

But what might have worked bringing up young George Raveling might not work 40 years later. And he’s not so sure that change is a good thing.

“There is a constant erosion of discipline,” he said. “We’re getting further and further away from the things that made us a great nation.

“We didn’t become a great nation with a shorter work week, with coddling people, with less discipline. We became a great nation by making great demands of ourselves and our country.”

And Krzyzewski didn’t take home consecutive NCAA championships coaching by somebody else’s standards.

“This is not about Lou Campanelli,” Coach K said. “It’s about setting one example and putting it on everybody. That would be a tragic mistake.

“The climate is to go overboard in setting an example. There is a public perception of how a person should coach all the time. That is a concern of the coaches.”

There are different ways to get to the same place, depending on who is taking you there. The question, however, is where you draw the abuse line. The coaches prefer to be the judges of that.

“A variety of coaching styles can produce positive results,” Raveling said. “As coaches we’ve got to be concerned with attempts to surrender the decisions about how we will teach and lead. There is a danger with any suggestion that a coach adopt a single leadership style. You can’t coach all athletes the same”

As an example, Raveling, a black, illustrated how he might greet two acquaintances, one white, the other black, quite differently, from “Good morning, how are you?” to “Hey, baby, what’s happening?”

In each case, though, there is no ridicule, no insult, no accusation involved. That is not always the case in the coach-player relationship. Coaches have been known, for example, to challenge players by calling them cowards. Is that proper?

“Maybe the kid is a coward,” said Krzyzewski, who played under Bobby Knight at West Point, where leadership was part of the academic curriculum.

“How do you attack a bad habit? You call attention to it.”

“You need the ability to discipline and direct young persons to higher levels of achievement and success,” Raveling said. “You often are an extension of their families.”

Coaches have a special relationship with their players. “Seventy-five% of the black players I coach have no father,” Raveling said. “The coach becomes a substitute for that father. We spend more time with kids than their parents.”

Raveling recalled being asked by a USC administrator if he would feel uncomfortable pursuing a $1 million contribution to the university. “I told him I ask for something more significant than that,” the coach said. “I ask on a yearly basis for them to entrust their children to me for four years.”

The relationship that develops once that commitment is made is what coaches and their institutions are wondering about now.