The hierarchical nature of athletic teams is one of those things that I think a great deal about. Why are athletic teams hierarchical? The very structure of athletic teams, or at least all those I have been a part of, places the coach at the top and then trickles additional power downwards through assistants, captains, leadership teams, etc. I get that it is the coach who will lose his/her job if the team doesn’t perform and I get that athletic departments are a hierarchical structure, but what I don’t get is why there is never a questioning of this format, and I do believe there are questions to be asked.

While researching for another project I came across the above model as presented by Neal & Neal (2013)and found it to be perhaps the most succinct model for understanding the ecosystem of team communication and influence. In particular, if you place the coach (or other leader) at the “A” position you start to see how he/she serves (or doesn’t serve) as a cultural reference point for the entire system.

While researching for another project I came across the above model as presented by Neal & Neal (2013)and found it to be perhaps the most succinct model for understanding the ecosystem of team communication and influence. In particular, if you place the coach (or other leader) at the “A” position you start to see how he/she serves (or doesn’t serve) as a cultural reference point for the entire system.

What is an athletic department without athletes? How do coaches coach a socially distant team? How do teams keep their team community alive when they can’t physically be together? How do you recruit players that you can’t see to a program that no longer has a shape? Etc. Etc. Etc.

“He/she just isn’t coachable.” I have uttered these words many times in my coaching career, and I have heard them spoken by my coaching peers many times as well. Back then, this label of “un-coachable” was branded upon those players who didn’t want to drink the Kool-Aid that I was selling as a coach. This could mean that the player in question didn’t want to prescribe to a set of tactics I was teaching, or maybe he/she didn’t want to play in the role I assigned to him/her. I reflect on my use of this term—and its proliferation in our sporting culture—and I cringe because under the pretense of player development resides the inescapable truth that “coachability” is code for conformity. If you are coachable, then you are doing what I, the coach, tell you to do; and if that is indeed true, then two further suppositions must be exposed. First, as a coach, I know what is right (coach-centered thinking), and second, that to develop as a player, you, the player, must do what I say (again, coach-centered thought). Welcome to America, where the coach is always right…

There is a natural power imbalance between player and coach and to many, the archetype of the coach is still associated with the command and control, throw a chair, Bobby Knight version. In other words, many learn that coaches are to be feared and when we are afraid, the easiest response is to avoid the thing that causes that fear.

What we call a team is nothing more than an idea. For a team to exist, team members must believe that it does. In this way, a team is a collection of individual ideas coalescing around a shared understanding of a form.

A friend who is a college coach tells me the other day that players from another program have been coming into his office asking for resources to develop their team’s culture. It seems that the program they are part of won a national championship a few years back, and since that time, they have changed coaches, and the team culture has plummeted. Performance is way down, and results are far removed from where they once were. The players have lost confidence in their coach and thus are turning to other coaches and programs for help.

What is the definition of culture? I don’t know. Despite this topic being of great academic interest to me, I am no closer to finding a definition now than I was before it became the focus of my research.

“Culture” is not an axiomatic term, each academic paradigm defines it differently (anthropology, social psychology, sociology, etc.), and its understanding is not consistent across paradigms. For example, “culture” to an Anthropologist is not the same “culture” to a Social Psychologist.

Teams need, and rely on, communication to perform at their best. However, teams rarely, if ever, practice how to communicate. This is the paradox.

When I speak of teams I am referring to athletic teams, as this paradox has become a staple area of development in most corporate cultures. In athletics, however, there is virtually no attention given—at least in an instructive form—to communication. This is a problem and this problem starts with how we educate coaches.