Recent conversations

I've been engaged in some very interesting conversations over the past... 15 months... although not really interesting enough to excuse such a long hiatus from writing!  But, what can I say.  Life's tough when you've got toddlers.  

So, these conversations.  I've heard from coaches at various levels of NCAA in a few different women's sports that "these athletes are just different", and not in a super positive way.  Many coaches I've talked to are at a loss for how to motivate their student-athletes because they don't exactly know what motivates them.  It seems like their student-athletes enjoy the connection being on a team brings, but they don't necessarily want to engage in the hard work it takes to be successful.  This can be a problem for several reasons — namely if the coaching staff is employed at a school that gauges success by win/loss records,  and coaches fear being dismissed if their teams aren't performing to the level they are expected to perform.  

I think there are several things to unpack here.  First, I think the general idea of "work ethic" has changed dramatically just over the past 10 years.  Hopefully, we've all read about how parenting styles have changed since WW2 — in general parents have moved from a less permissive style to a more permissive style, allowing children to have more autonomy and agency than they ever had before.  This change sometimes results in children and young adults who are more creative, more inclusive, and more agreeable because they haven't heard "no" a million times a day.  One idea supporting the more permissive style is that kids will actually learn right from wrong by making choices on their own, rather than having someone tell them what to do.  Think about fighting with a kid to wear a coat when it's cold outside -- permissive parenting would say the natural consequence is the kid will learn their lesson and wear a coat in the future.  Less permissive parenting would say "It's cold outside, you're wearing a coat."  I think these parenting style changes really have had an impact on work ethic in America today.  And I have to say, I was really surprised when I googled the actual definition of work ethic.  Merriam-Webster defines it as "a belief in work as a moral good : a set of values centered on the importance of doing work and reflected especially in a desire or determination to work hard".  Oxford Dictionary on Google defines it as "the principle that hard work is intrinsically virtuous or worthy of reward".  So if we accept that the definitions of "moral" and "virtuous" basically mean being concerned with right and wrong, good and evil, then that means that if one has a strong work ethic, they see work as something good, that is a duty and obligation, that leads to some sort of reward that might be internal or external.  We'd assume that college athletes, particularly those at the highest level of competition -- D1 in a Power 5 Conference -- would have a strong work ethic.  They would see their workouts and academics as something good, as a duty and obligation, that leads to some sort of reward at the end of the season, either intrinsic (like breaking personal records or being in the best shape of their life) or extrinsic (like winning an award or a conference championship).  But somewhere, this has changed.  

Last year I had a group of seniors who were participating in their final semester of internship before they graduated.  This group of students complained.  Often.  They complained about not being allowed to do enough work at their internships, they complained about being told to do too much work.  They complained about filing.  They complained about traveling to do home visits.  They complained about their key cards.  They complained about being told their clothing was "inappropriate" for the office.  They complained about the number of hours they had to complete to graduate (which was not a University policy).  They complained about our class being too long.  They complained about our class being too short.  They complained about other classmates talking too much.  They complained they didn't get the chance to talk enough.  You get the idea.  It was an exhausting year.  But, they all wanted that degree.  They all wanted to walk across the stage, they all wanted to get senior portraits done all over campus, and they wanted to receive gifts for their graduation.  One particular day I was listening to one of my students complain about a number of things, including the fact that she had an hourly-wage job at a convenience store at night that she needed so that she could pay her rent, in addition to her 16-hour per week internship and a full-time course load.  She was really frustrated because she didn't understand why, when no one was in the convenience store, she couldn't just be on her phone and "relaxing" (I tried to argue that being on social media was actually anything but relaxing, but you can imagine how that went.)  Her manager told her, "If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean."  This incensed my entire class.  "WE ARE OVERWORKED!  WE ARE TIRED! WE NEED A BREAK!"  I listened with my best social work skills, trying to compassionately see their side of the argument.  But it was very hard for me.  Why?  Because I was a first-generation college student who went to school 1,000 miles away from my parents and had to complete the same requirements they currently did while playing two sports, nannying for a family with three kids 3 to 4 days a week, engaging in a social life, and getting grades that would get me into graduate school.  I'd done all the things and came out shiny on the other side.  Why couldn't they see that?  What was different about them and me?  

How is this example connected to student athletes?  I truly think that many athletes today want the accolades, particularly at the highest levels of competition.  They want the Name/Image/Likeness (NIL) deals, they want the personal recognition, they want the pats on the back, they want the swag.  And if they don't get it?  They enter the transfer portal to find happiness somewhere else (Spoiler:  it doesn't really work that way).  But, this goes along with that permissive parenting style, right?  “So you don’t like it?  Ok, let’s try another option.”  With some athletes, getting the degree becomes secondary to the accolades, and the transfer rules are not set up to really support a 4- or even 5- or 6-year graduation plan.  And the connection the student-athlete had with one school gets shifted to different school colors and a different mascot.  Why?  Because they feel overworked, tired, and in need of a break.  They might have time to lean, but they sure as heck aren’t going to clean.  The people in my age bracket and older are all screaming.  "How are you feeling overworked, tired, and in need of a break?  All of this is so much easier than it was when I was in school!" And I think, to some extent, that's true.  The NCAA just put out their latest document on student-athlete mental health, which there have been exactly two of in the history of the NCAA and they’ve both come out in the past four years.   Before Covid, no one seemed to be really concerned with mental health among college athletes, and the fact that the Sports Science Institute started investigating mental health at the same time as Covid was truly a coincidence (prove to me it wasn’t).  Also, the rules have been adjusted across all divisions to ensure athletes aren't spending an exorbitant amount of time training, to make sure they aren’t being punished too hard, and to make sure student-athletes are safer than they were in the 2000s.  (For example, I didn’t play field hockey, but the coach at my undergrad was so mad at the team after they lost a game they should have won that she didn’t stop the vans to buy them dinner after the game.  She got in trouble for that, but she definitely didn’t get fired for it.  That was life in 2002.). So in some regards, life for student athletes actually IS easier than it was 20 years ago.  So what is the deal?  

Before I give any answers (really, hypotheses), I’m curious about your thoughts.  What have you seen on your teams?  What behaviors are different now, that you didn’t have to deal with 10 years ago?  How are you coping with the changes in your team’s needs?  And what do you think is behind it?