<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This article originally appeared in the Sept. 28, 2015, issue of &lt;/em&gt;Sports Illustrated. &lt;em&gt;Lauren Shute contributed reporting. You can subscribe to the magazine here.&lt;/em&gt;\r\n\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just how thoroughly Simon Cvijanovic once identified as an Illinois football player sits right there in his Twitter handle. And it was on that social media platform, in a series of tweets in May, that the former offensive tackle known as @IlliniSi documented how he had allegedly been abused, and thereby emphatically put on notice a college sports establishment where power has long tilted toward coaches at players\u2019 expense.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cvijanovic, a senior starter from Cleveland, charged that third-year coach Tim Beckman pressured him to play with knee and shoulder injuries. Cvijanovic resisted, which he says prompted Beckman to ridicule him by forcing him to watch practice while dressed in an opposing team\u2019s uniform. Further, he claimed that Beckman concealed from him the extent of his injuries. \u201CIf I\u2019m hurt, I\u2019m hurt,\u201D he tweeted. \u201CI don\u2019t need to be called a pussy to make me make bad decisions for my body.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was this a cri de coeur or sour grapes from someone who had quit the team late in the 2014 season? Athletic director Mike Thomas first called Cvijanovic\u2019s outburst a \u201Cpersonal attack\u201D on Beckman, and a core of Illini players sided publicly with their coach. But then the script flipped. Andrew Weber, a former kicker at Toledo, where Beckman coached before coming to Champaign, weighed in with a tweet of his own: \u201CWe had the exact same issues. Thanks for standing up!\u201D The &lt;em&gt;Daily Illini&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Chicago Tribune&lt;/em&gt; found more players who told stories similar to Cvijanovic\u2019s, with the &lt;em&gt;Tribune&lt;/em&gt; reporting that six other Illini alleged Beckman would threaten to take scholarships away from injured players. Chancellor Phyllis Wise retained an outside law firm to investigate, and in late August, a week before the team\u2019s opener, Thomas cited preliminary findings that broadly supported Cvijanovic\u2019s claims in announcing Beckman\u2019s dismissal. \u201CThe university decided to follow the adage \u2018ready, shoot, aim\u2019 in terminating coach Beckman before its own investigation was close to complete,\u201D Bruce Braun, a Chicago litigator retained by the former Illinois coach, told SI. \u201CIts alleged preliminary findings are entirely baseless and devoid of merit.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u2022 &lt;strong&gt;MORE: Will P.J. Flick usher in a new era of coaches?&lt;/strong&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;College sports has a long tradition of coaches orchestrating valorous suffering. Football teams such as Bear Bryant\u2019s 1954 Texas A&amp;amp;M Junction Boys and Charlie Bradshaw\u2019s \u201862 Thin Thirty at Kentucky endured methods that would meet most modern tests of torture. But gauzy mythologizing of male bonding under abusive leadership has given way to broad outrage at incriminating video\u2014of Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight going after guard Neil Reed\u2019s jugular in \u201897 and of Mike Rice pushing, throwing balls at and kicking his Rutgers basketball players between profane doses of antigay invective in 2013. Meanwhile, allegations of abusive coaching now surface frequently in nonrevenue sports, particularly those for women. Abuse may be occurring no more often than before, but it\u2019s simply coming to light because more players, empowered by digital tools, are standing up for themselves.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The news bristles with allegations of abuse far from the public glare of Big Ten football. According to a 2013 Yahoo! Sports report, swimmers at Utah said they blacked out, went into convulsions and needed emergency treatment because of the tactics of former coach Greg Winslow, who allegedly ordered one Ute to swim underwater with PVC pipe strapped to his back and another to do so with a mesh bag over her head. (Winslow, who was placed on USA Swimming\u2019s banned for life list last year for having had a sexual relationship with one of his underage club swimmers in 2007, did not respond to multiple requests from SI for comment.)\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yet today most abuse isn\u2019t physical, but psychological or emotional, often directed at injured or sick players. Multiple players and a former assistant coach told Providence\u2019s WJAR-TV in 2014 that, before Rhode Island chose not to renew her contract in May, softball coach Erin Layton often targeted injured or ill players, whom she would threaten with comments like, \u201CDon\u2019t ever get sick again, or I\u2019m going to kill you.\u201D In response, some players say they developed ulcers or eating disorders or committed self-harm. \u201CThe school did conduct an investigation and found no basis for the charges,\u201D says Layton, who didn\u2019t want to address specific allegations because of guidelines governing medical confidentiality. \u201CI always followed the instructions of the athletic trainer on staff. I can assure you that I\u2019m not the person that story made me out to be.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u201CI believe this is a cultural problem,\u201D says Ramogi Huma, executive director of the National College Players Association, which often hears from abused athletes. \u201CA lot of coaches, they were hollered at and abused when they were players.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The problem is particularly acute in women\u2019s basketball. Over the past 28 months at least seven Division I schools have investigated, suspended or parted ways with coaches in that sport following player complaints of mistreatment. Illinois bought out associate coach Mike Divilbiss after players and parents complained that Divilbiss and coach Matt Bollant verbally abused the players and fostered racial divisiveness. The school chose to retain Bollant following yet another outside investigation that, while finding no wrongdoing, included the coaches\u2019 acknowledgment that their \u201Ccoaching at times was too negative.\u201D Seven former players refused to speak to investigators; they have filed a $10 million civil suit that charges the school and coaches with fostering a racially hostile environment.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u201CI\u2019m a really upbeat and energetic guy, and I want the program to be a reflection of me,\u201D says Bollant, who doesn\u2019t dispute the report\u2019s conclusion that he and Divilbiss played the roles of \u201Cgood cop, bad cop,\u201D respectively, with things sometimes leaning \u201Ctoo far to the bad cop side.\u201D He says he welcomes Thomas\u2019s pledge to enact a formal code of conduct for Illini coaches and a protocol for athletes to lodge complaints. \u201CThey went through 18,000 documents and watched film of every practice and game, so it\u2019s pretty telling,\u201D says Divilbiss, who\u2019s pleased with the report\u2019s findings. \u201CYou coach for 30 years, there are going to be people you connect with and people you don\u2019t.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We\u2019ve come a long way from the days when abuse consisted of suicide sprints in 110\u00B0 heat without water breaks. Boston University women\u2019s basketball players going back nearly a decade told The Boston Globe and espnW.com of alleged psychological beatdowns behind the closed door of coach Kelly Greenberg\u2019s office. There Greenberg would sit a player down, with a box of Kleenex to dry the tears that frequently spilled forth, and deliver her appraisals. Players reported hearing that they were \u201Cworthless,\u201D \u201Ctoo shy and backward to get anywhere in life,\u201D and \u201Cnever should have been born,\u201D with the abuse sometimes veering into personal appearance. \u201CThe one-on-ones were never about basketball,\u201D former Terriers guard Katie Poppe told SI. \u201CIt was about who I was, my personality, my relationship with my parents. I remember one time she printed out the definition of sheepish. She told me I needed to be sheepish. She said I needed to not speak a single word for the rest of the year in the locker room. That was how the meeting started\u2014I wasn\u2019t allowed to speak.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a starter or contributor, she says, \u201CI wasn\u2019t told what a miserable waste of life I was. But as soon as I got hurt, I was called into those meetings every day. As if I wasn\u2019t upset enough about getting hurt.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Greenberg, who resigned in April 2014, denies making those comments. \u201CI come from parents who were both coaches. My 11 brothers and sisters all played basketball. That\u2019s not how I treat people.\u201D Greenberg told SI, \u201CUnfortunately, I was never addressed with any of these problems. They went directly to the media, so it was out of my hands\u2014out of my university\u2019s hands. Coaching is a challenge these days.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Huma says that when he gets calls from abused players, he advises them to seek counseling. \u201CAbout half of them,\u201D he says, \u201Calready have.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;*****\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It\u2019s not clear exactly when college athletes became less responsive to the bullying coach, though the diminishing NCAA basketball tournament success of Knight\u2019s Indiana teams after 1994 provides a clue. Nor is it clear which factors led to this sea change. Perhaps the travel-team world of youth sports began to produce a young athlete who expects more support; maybe modern helicopter parents and their children are reluctant to loosen their bond so discipline can be subcontracted out to coaches. But the evidence is clear: For its 2010 Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations and Learning of Students in College (GOALS) study, the NCAA gathered data from almost 20,000 college athletes. Paired with a contemporaneous American College Health Association (ACHA) assessment of almost 54,000 undergraduates, 7.5% of them varsity athletes, the results make explicit both the extent of abusive coaching and the fragility of the athletes being abused. In Division I, 31% of men\u2019s basketball players and 22% of football players reported that a coach \u201Cputs me down in front of others,\u201D according to the GOALS study, and only 39% of women\u2019s basketball players strongly agreed that \u201Cmy head coach can be trusted.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even more alarming, athletes have never been more psychologically vulnerable, reflecting a trend among all college students. The ACHA assessment found that 41% of athletes had \u201Cfelt so depressed that it was difficult to function\u201D and 52% had \u201Cfelt overwhelming anxiety,\u201D with the figures for women jumping to 45% and 59%, respectively. Further, 14% of athletes said they had \u201Cseriously considered suicide,\u201D with 6% having attempted it. From Penn runner Madison Holleran and Ohio State defensive lineman Kosta Karageorge, to Missouri swimmer Sasha Menu Courey and North Texas basketball player Eboniey Jeter, recent athlete suicides have included victims of both genders and a broad range of backgrounds, academic settings and sports.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Poor mental health is even more common among college students who don\u2019t play sports. But those ACHA figures are for athletes competing across all NCAA divisions; just as rule-breaking and low graduation rates are most problematic on Division I campuses, there are indications that mental health is worst where the stakes are highest and demands most intense. A 2013 Georgetown University Medical Center study asked 117 current and 163 former D-I athletes if they suffered from depression. Researchers expected the ex-athletes to be most susceptible, as they navigated the transition from the spotlight. Instead the study found depression to be more than twice as common among active athletes than those who had finished their college careers.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since he arrived in January 2013 as the NCAA\u2019s first chief medical officer, Dr. Brian Hainline has met with members of Student Athlete Advisory Committees on dozens of campuses. \u201CUniformly, they tell me they really hope we\u2019ll address mental health,\u201D he says. Hainline has made sure that the next GOALS survey, the results of which will be released in January, will capture even more data about athletes\u2019 well-being, and by early next year he also expects to distribute a set of mental health best practices to schools in all three NCAA divisions. Most of those recommendations, he says, will be preventative\u2014\u201Dhow to get things right at the front end.\u201D In November 2013, Hainline convened a three-day task force on mental health that included administrators, medical professionals, coaches, trainers and clinical social workers as well as athletes. \u201CAt some point during that task force,\u201D he says, \u201Ceveryone broke down.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hainline says his outreach efforts will address abusive coaching\u2014to a point. \u201CThe NCAA isn\u2019t in a place to be a coaching certification body,\u201D he says. \u201CBut we are in a place to supply education. The reality is that not every coach is sensitive to the mental health issue. We want mental health to be as treatable as an ankle sprain.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;He also knows that drawing up best practices isn\u2019t a solution. \u201CEven if we get the knowledge out to 1,100 schools, as in any aspect of public health the most difficult challenge is getting what we know reliably implemented,\u201D says Hainline, who\u2019s trained as a neurologist. \u201CBut culturally, we\u2019re getting to a place of acceptance. I get the sense that talking about mental health is less of a taboo.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a tennis player at Notre Dame during the 1970s, Hainline himself went through a bout of depression. He quit the team and lost his scholarship, but returned after a hiatus, winding up as the Irish\u2019s No. 1 singles player his senior year while paying his own way. \u201CI came back to tennis on my own terms, not my coach\u2019s or my father\u2019s,\u201D he says. \u201CThere\u2019s a big difference between the athlete who\u2019s positively engaged and takes full ownership of his sport and one who\u2019s really playing for someone else.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or as Jim Thompson, the founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA), a Bay Area--based group pledged to overthrowing the negative coaching paradigm, puts it, \u201CIt\u2019s hard to be driven when you\u2019re being driven.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;*****\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The inspiration for the PCA struck Thompson at Stanford Business School during a class on organizational behavior. His professor had introduced the concept of \u201Cthreat rigidity\u201D\u2014the instinctive response of leaders, when in a tight spot, to become defensive, reactive and likely to revert to old, even discredited ways of doing things. Today, with trainers around the country and a trove of online resources, the PCA evangelizes for coaching rules of thumb like \u201Cdemanding, not demeaning,\u201D and the \u201C5-to-1 ratio\u201D: five instances of encouragement to every one of criticism. \u201CI have sympathy for coaches,\u201D Thompson says. \u201CEspecially at the college level, a coach knows that if he doesn\u2019t win he\u2019ll lose his job.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u201CBut the best way to get the best out of athletes is to create a positive culture in which they\u2019re respected and believe in their value, and that the coach believes in them. The idea of the all-knowing coach who has lots of power and uses it in the way we now call bullying\u2014that was kind of the norm. But all the research shows that it\u2019s not the way to get the best out of people.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some of the most striking evidence comes from Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, the author of Positivity and a social psychologist who runs the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology (PEP) Lab at North Carolina. \u201CNegative emotions grab people\u2019s attention more,\u201D says Fredrickson, who attributes this to evolutionary reasons, because survival in the prehistoric environment often depended on sudden alerts. \u201CSo there\u2019s a perception that the best way to get what you want out of employees or players is by negativity or threats, or being stressful or intense. But in terms of bonding, loyalty, commitment to a team or a group and personal development over time, negativity doesn\u2019t work as well as positivity.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fredrickson\u2019s research shows that positive emotions expand awareness, allowing for reception of a broader array of information. They make people more flexible, resilient and creative. A collegeage athlete can be highly susceptible to the influence of coaches, parents and peers, and may not have fully developed what she calls \u201Cresilient emotional regulation,\u201D so abuse may leave a deeper scar on a young adult than an older one.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Two of her findings speak directly to the player-coach relationship. \u201CPositive emotions are especially contagious,\u201D she says, \u201Cand a leader\u2019s positive emotions are more contagious than anyone else\u2019s.\u201D Her other insight comes as a result of eye-tracking analysis, brain imaging and behavioral studies, which together show that improved mood actually broadens the perceptual field. \u201CPeople\u2019s peripheral vision expands,\u201D she says, \u201Cwhen they\u2019re experiencing positive emotions.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In other words, by yelling at his point guard for missing that wide-open teammate in the corner, a coach has probably ensured that it will happen again.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The brain is a work in progress, constantly shaped by the experiences around us. But the brains of young adults are particularly malleable. If young people tend to make unwise choices, it\u2019s partly because the prefrontal cortex isn\u2019t fully developed until after age 25. Meanwhile adversity and stress can impair neurogenesis, the process by which that ever-evolving brain produces new cells. According to Dr. Richard Davidson, who directs the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at Wisconsin, \u201Cthere\u2019s some evidence to suggest that stress can impair the circuitry that regulates negative emotions in particular. So [abuse] can have this very pernicious effect, which can have a spiraling effect and lead to an increase in negative emotions as a consequence.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the late 1990s, Dr. Ben Tepper of Ohio State\u2019s Fisher College of Business has made abusive leadership in the workplace his specialty. He gathers data from such fields as manufacturing, health care, financial services, education and the military, and he is so renowned in his field that the NCAA has used his Abusive Supervision Scale, aka the Tepper Scale, in its GOALS report. Believing that the coach-athlete relationship is essentially a boss-employee arrangement by another name, Tepper overlaid GOALS results on to his own vocation-by-vocation data. What he saw left him slackjawed: Abusive leadership is two to three times as prevalent in college sports as in the orthodox workplace.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;When he studies an industry, Tepper identifies what he calls \u201Cprecursors in the environment\u201D that make abuse more likely. \u201CThey\u2019re all in sharp relief in college coaching,\u201D he says. \u201CBosses under stress combined with targets who are weak and vulnerable and can\u2019t fight back. Talent can give you some power, but it\u2019s not like you can just say, \u2018I\u2019m leaving,\u2019 because you have to sit out a year. The only protection an athlete has is to be an amazing performer.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;One other thing left Tepper astonished. \u201CI\u2019m trained as a psychologist, so my interest from the beginning has been in well-being,\u201D he says. \u201CAnd when I see the depression levels of young athletes\u2014our best young people, physically and mentally, who have taken all the steps to get to a high level\u2014that just throws me for a loop. To see them that vulnerable must mean the environment is overwhelming.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our conviction that hostility works is encouraged by a culture that makes legendary figures of Knight and Steve Jobs. Tepper believes that both succeeded in spite of their abusive leadership\u2014that Knight was very tactically smart, and Jobs had a rare combination of design sense and business acumen. \u201CThe studies all say there\u2019s no incremental benefit to being hostile,\u201D he says. \u201CEven when you control for a leader\u2019s experience and expertise, hostility always produces diminishing returns.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The work of Tepper and others subverts more assumptions. Doesn\u2019t a coach who yells convey urgency that helps players muster strength? In fact, he says, abuse is depleting: \u201CWe all have a finite amount of energy. You\u2019re concerned with whether your coach will yell at you rather than doing your job, so it impairs your executive function. And bosses who combine hostility with support are more depleting, because you don\u2019t know what\u2019s coming next.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Doesn\u2019t a hostile coach create team cohesion? In fact, she\u2019s more likely to create fault lines and cliques, which can lead to a downward spiral. \u201CIf you\u2019re angered by your environment, it\u2019s harder to come together with others in that environment,\u201D Tepper says. \u201CAnd it can create these weird rifts. At Illinois, you had a [football] player who felt violated, and other players who felt he needed to \u2018man up.\u2019 That can\u2019t be good for team effectiveness.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tepper\u2019s office sits steps from Ohio Stadium, where he knows the Buckeyes\u2019 football coaches raise their voices at practice. What little he has heard doesn\u2019t alarm him: \u201CThere\u2019s lots of yelling, but it\u2019s more exhortative and attention-getting, not degrading. There\u2019s a fine line, and you can teach it to people.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;*****\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over time, abusive coaching will become discredited as more evidence accumulates that it doesn\u2019t work. But for now the struggle against bullies with clipboards comes down to power and who exercises it. For an athlete to speak up requires someone suddenly living on her own to defy an array of authority figures, perhaps break with teammates and be willing to jeopardize a scholarship that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. If not for social media, the world would see Simon Cvijanovic as a has-been bitterly collecting his final credits at Illinois. Instead, Twitter allowed him to make his case and invite others to jump in and build it further. \u201CThere\u2019s a little more rebellion against bullying coaches because athletes now feel they have a few more options,\u201D Jim Thompson says. \u201CIf you don\u2019t have any options, you don\u2019t have any power.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ramogi Huma hopes the Illinois football and women\u2019s basketball cases lead the NCAA to codify a baseline set of unacceptable behaviors. \u201CA player should not be physically abused,\u201D he says. \u201CA coach should not use racially abusive language. If that\u2019s universally defined as a starting point, a player could now say, Yes, something\u2019s wrong with my coach. And that coach would be put on notice.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yet the problem may get worse before it gets better. One of the biggest successes in the crusade for athletes\u2019 rights is the recent move by BCS schools to guarantee scholarships. As more colleges adopt that model, the coach who wants to get rid of a player can no longer simply refuse to renew a grant-in-aid at the end of the school year. Paradoxically and perversely, he or she will have only one tool left: Make life so miserable for those unwanted athletes that they leave of their own accord.\r\n&lt;/p&gt;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.si.com/college-basketball/2015/09/29/end-abusive-coaches-college-football-basketball>