It Hurts, But Where Can You Go?

My face gets hot when I’m angry. Although the weather hardly ever cracks 70 degrees in a Danish August, I was sweating.

I sat in the room with Dorthe and Lars Bro, along with their daughter Signe. Signe was telling me that she was leaving the team. I was throwing everything I could against the wall, figuratively, to see if I could convince her to stay.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I had spent more of the previous two years with Signe then with my own 18 month old daughter. Shortly after I started coaching her, I’d declined a trip to the Faroe Islands so I wouldn’t miss Olivia’s birth.

Since then, beyond the 25 hours a week at practice and the weekend long meets, there had been a trip on a train across the country. A training camp in Croatia, followed by a meet in Monaco, then the European Junior Championships. The next year brought a trip to London (which I begged out of half of) and a 12 day stay in Baku, Azerbaijan.

So when she said she was leaving, I wasn’t just mad, I was furious.

I think I managed to stay composed, except for when I blurted out to the room: “you know this will be the end of me coaching here right?”. All three Bro’s just bowed their head. I’d be out of a job two months later.

As a coach, losing a swimmer, particularly a high performing swimmer is hard.

There are so many concurrent problems, many of which I’d written about, at play here, but for coaches the situation defies simple explanation. All of the following are true but way too simplistic to diagnose the situation:

It’s a problem when coaches spend more time with other people’s children than their own
Youth sports in general get way too serious at way too young an age, leading to cascading problems (thankfully in this situation just a grumpy coach)
Coaches have few outlets to go to for the most emotionally difficult parts of their job
It is almost inevitable that with the system as currently structured, it will appear as if coaches show favoritism to their best athletes
The structure of the coach-athlete relationship at the “elite” level has an incredibly toxic side
Finally, coaches careers are MADE on their highest performing athletes (just ask Bob Bowman), so one some level you’d have a career death wish if you didn’t invest in high performing athletes.

I don’t have time to address all of the above. So I want to focus on number three, because it speaks with empathy to other coaches. I know it hurts when someone leaves your team, particularly an athlete that you’ve spent a lot of time with. That time means a relationship, and I say that without judgement over whether it’s a good or healthy one. Losing a relationship hurts.

Structure of a Coach-Athlete Relationship

Let me expand on that for a moment, because I find relationships in general to be a rich topic. What does a coach-athlete relationship look like, how can it get intense so that a coach feels deep emotion when it ends? I’m going to try to avoid judgment for the moment on what is a “good” coach-athlete relationship or a “toxic” one, as I’ve written about that too many times.

And it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, sexual contact between a coach and an athlete is not a relationship, IT IS ABUSE. PERIOD.

I’m also going to talk in particular about “high performing” athletes, because of #6 on the above list, it’s not really important in some ways what your definition of “high-performing”. Few readers may consider 1:00 in the 100 freestyle high performing but if that is the fastest athlete on your team then it is “high performing” in your context.

This has implications down to the lower levels of sport. Paradoxically, from the top down as a leader of an organization you want coaches that are focused on long term development and the breadth of swimmers that they coach.

And if those developmental coaches have a shred of ambition for a “higher rung” in the sport, they will not heed that advice- again read #6. Let’s imagine a world where Bob Bowman is just a developmental coach you’ve never heard of toiling away for a lower middle class wage in Baltimore. It would probably be better for a lot of kids on NBAC but definitely not for Bowman.

If you coach for a living you spend a lot of time with your athletes. That includes time with them at practice, but these days it will also include plenty of time outside of practice. Or even time when you’re not physically in the same place

I once had a 20 year old athlete call me and leave a voicemail saying only “we need to talk”. I felt a similar anxiety to when anyone important in your life leaves such a message. When I called him back, he told me he wanted to talk about which races he would compete in for the next meet. I told him to never leave a voicemail like that for me again, then we picked races.

But the intimacy of the coach-athlete relationship does not come just from raw time spent together. It also comes from the intensity of the experience. The core of sports is an environment for learning and personal growth. But you don’t learn or grow personally from taking it easy.

So you work hard, and you push each other to get better. You have conflicts and resolve them. Success is among the best feelings you can imagine, and failure can cause your stomach to sink like a roller coaster that never pulls up from a downward plunge.

Like all things though, it ends. Sometimes that end comes in a very orderly, planned fashion. Seniors finish their final season and move on in life. There might be tears but at least you have time to prepare.

Sometimes it ends suddenly.

So what now?

Five years later, it’s still easy to put myself physically back in my office at 25 Adolphsvej. After the hurt and the sadness and the anger, my thoughts turned to figuring out what I had done wrong.

I needed to find out what was wrong with me as a coach that a swimmer that I’d shared a lot with didn’t want me to continue coaching them.

That was a mistake, one that’s taken me a long time to process. Often in life we rush to analyze.

First you need a way to process the hurt. You need time to mourn the loss of a relationship. At that time I had nowhere to turn. I knew it was wrong to show my hurt to the other swimmers I coached. As head coach, I didn’t feel like I could turn to any of the other coaches on my staff.

Rival coaches? No way, especially the one three miles away that would now be her coach. At home, my wife was upset with me for how much time I spent on the job and away from home, and justifiably so. So I didn’t think it wise to go to her.

The result? I convinced myself that I tucked it into the recesses of my brain. As I say to others and often need said to me, emotions don’t work like that. They roar back, often when you least want them to, unless you find a way to express them.

Coaches, just like athletes, need as many other, safe, adult relationships as they can have to be able to take an emotional load off.

You need to be able to communicate even in that moment that you are upset. You’re not hurting a young person by doing this. In fact, as long as you communicate it appropriately you are continuing your work as a coach by modeling appropriate behavior.

Only once you actually feel your emotions and process them can you decide what’s next, and if you don’t you’ll end up like I did. I didn’t speak to Signe for months after that, and only infrequently at that. I fumed and pouted. I wasn’t fully there for the swimmers that I still coached, the ones who had stayed the course and continued to believe that staying was best for them.