Written by Edwin Kramer, PsyD
Part I: Introduction
All coaches understand X’s and O’s, a mental conception of how basketball should be played, and ideas about how to teach skills. Very often they do an excellent job with their players. However, situations occur where their techniques fail or are less effective than desired because of a lack of understanding of group dynamics. Most books indicate that in addition to his other jobs, a coach should function as a psychologist, yet he/she has only limited training as a psychologist, tends to work well with certain types, and becomes negative (and possibly acts out on his anger) when players fail to meet his/her expectations.
This paper describes how I combined my coaching and psychoanalytic experience to experiment with a coach’s psychoanalytic supervision. I sought to discover whether supervision could strengthen a coach’s skill as a team leader and improve his players’ performance during a twenty-week basketball season. On some level, I believe that coaching can be dangerous work, the stress of which occasionally leads to heart attacks, cancer, mental and emotional breakdown, alcoholism and other anxiety-related disorders. While a coach must appear like an outgoing, gregarious person, in reality, he/she is isolated, and his self-esteem and identity is tied to whether he wins or loses. He is the repository not just of his own stresses, but of each player’s tensions, as well as pressures from the school administration and fans, who may turn on him when the team loses. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss an alternative approach – a professionally trained listener who can meet with a coach on a regular basis and hear him without bias or judgment. This paper describes the great benefit to both coach and team resulting from such collaboration.
Part II: Methodology
At the time of this research project, I had not only played basketball myself but had been a coach of several college basketball teams. I also was a certified psychoanalyst in private practice. I asked Dan, a basketball coach of a junior-varsity team whom I had known briefly eight years earlier when he played for a local college varsity team if he would be willing to participate in my research. Dan had three years experience as a coach, was dedicated to coaching, and was pursuing a Masters Degree in Physical Education. I asked him to meet with me weekly at my office during the course of the basketball season, beginning just prior to the October 15 starting date and continuing to the end of the season, early April. In all, we had twenty fifty-minute sessions. I charged him no fee because I was seeing him for research purposes only. I functioned as his supervisor. I based my behavior on the ways I had been supervised. I based my behavior on the ways I had been supervised during my psychoanalytic training and very closely on the model presented in Spotnitz’s (1976) “Trends in Modern Psychoanalytic Supervision.” I asked him to discuss all his thoughts and feelings related to the team, his own job as coach, and anything that came to his mind about working with each player.
I tried to study his resistances (blocks to effective functioning), his transference (feelings from his past that were enacted toward me), and my response toward him. I also studied those things that blocked him, his team or me from functioning effectively. I presented Dan’s case twice a month in my supervision sessions. My supervisor’s insights were incorporated into my strategy during Dan’s sessions are reflected in this report. Some years later, I scheduled a follow-up session with Dan, also for fifty minutes, to hear his evaluation of the experience.
I reexamined which elements interfered with his ability to help his teamwork in a cooperative manner. In addition, I searched for evidence of the coach’s acting out with me his problems with his team, team-members’ problems with him or each other. And his intrapsychic conflicts. I ordered the selected sessions chronologically and this is how they are described in the case material contained herein.
Part III: Case Illustration
Session 1: In our first meeting together, a few days after the start of tryouts for the team, I helped Dan agree to a contract: to come to his appointment on time, talk about his reactions to his team, and report how his team was doing. I asked him to tell me how each member functioned with each
other and with him. I requested that whomever he chose for the team make a contract parallel to the one that the two of us had just made. He should ask them to agree to attend all scheduled practices, games, team meetings, and functions on time. They also should be asked to work cooperatively for the team’s success. He said he would do this with his team. (Later I learned that he had not asked them to talk about their thoughts and feelings as players.)
In the first session, I was struck by the similarity between how he talked and how a client beginning therapy would talk. He revealed that he did not take good care of himself. He was not eating healthily; his sex life was nonexistent; his best friend had moved to Europe, so he no longer had a sympathetic ear, and his mother was ill. He felt isolated. He also seemed similar to other coaches I had known. He was a conscientious and hardworking man, dedicated to becoming an excellent coach. There had been some tryouts for his team, and he thought the talent was good. He complained that even if he chose good players and formed a skillful team, he would lose them to the Varsity coach because his efforts to develop a harmonious group that worked well together were being destroyed.
But the first session highlighted a central problem in his coaching. He wanted to work only with people toward whom he had a positive feeling and who had a positive attitude toward him. He had no interest in working with their resistances to cooperating with him. Why should he have to work on their attitudes? He wanted them to be enthusiastic students sitting at the feet of the Master. This was evident when he explained how he chose players: “ If on the first day of practice, I suspect an anti-coach attitude in a player, I get rid of him.” His behavior seemed somewhat illogical, for most players will hide their real attitudes until they are accepted for the team. He noticed that the potential team-members resented having to learn anything from him. They preferred to scrimmage rather than drill or be taught or be asked to change in any way.
When he cut players, he did not want them to have negative feelings around him: “I want those who are cut to feel I am fair.” I asked him about his criteria for picking a team. How could he know a player would have an attitude? He explained his policy for cutting people. He cut players he thought were dangerous and prone to violence. He cut people he thought could not play, those who could not be good team players. He cut players who would argue with everyone – people who were “bad news” and could create havoc. But he wanted to be thought of as a “nice guy”, even when, essentially, he was failing some players in his course. I tried to help him think differently about cutting players during tryouts. Could he ask how each player would want a coach to behave with him?
However, Dan tended to dismiss players because of his initial reactions to them. He told a story of how he talked to an abrasive player, who had loudly criticized a teammate while playing. Dan took him out of the game and yelled, “You have to be careful with other people’s feelings!” He said, “The guy was a headache,” but he was disturbed when the player did not return the next day or thereafter. I inquired, “What do you want me to do about that?” Dan replied, “Nothing. If they don’t want to come back, fine.” He wanted players to demonstrate their motivation for the game by their ability to tolerate him. What would have been new for him would have been to go after the player. Many coaches go after players to recruit them but do not pursue them when they are already working for the team. Perhaps because negative feelings enter the relationship or they take the players for granted, they may stop trying to help them be effective team members.
After listening to his complaints about his players, I discussed the concept of transference with him. I said, “When a coach works in a gym there are players who have positive feelings toward him and some who have negative feelings. Some players fear the coach; some resent him. Players bring with them past attitudes toward authority figures; their negative responses, therefore, are not necessarily personal to you but can be used to understand their past experiences.
I suggested that he have his team do log cards and reaction papers in which they could say anything about themselves, each other, or the coach. I told him that logs would help him to gain insight and save time in learning how to work with his players. I added that it was helpful for players to verbalize all thoughts and feelings. Often there was talk among players about what was really going on with the team – in the locker room and elsewhere – to which the coach was not privy. I wanted him to be able to hear some of their comments. Logs would help him use his players as consultants. A group leader needs as much feedback from group members as possible to work effectively. Dan remarked, however, that his “players only wanted to have a conversation. “I could not get him to agree to ask his team to write logs.
He also refused to have team meetings. To him, a meeting was a lecture where the coach criticized his players and told them what he wanted. I suggested, to the contrary, that a team meeting could benefit him: “If you want to know what the team thinks, why not ask the players?” Could you inquire, “How could we make the team better?” The person responsible for the team’s success should not be the coach alone. If you take the advice of a member, credit him. If the advice is poor and you use it, take responsibility for using a bad idea.
In talking with Dan, I was struck by the fact that coaches’ supervision was necessary first because they have to constantly deal with the challenge of cutting players, working with personalities who are not necessarily their personal choices but who benefit the team, and handling players’ resistances to teamwork (anything that interferes with the cooperative functioning of the group) as well as their family problems. Second, coaches experience tremendous emotional pressure – perhaps from players’ parents, the school administration, the players, the school administration, and even their families. Third, coaches are stressed by their attitudes: They are highly competitive people. To keep functioning, a coach sometimes expresses feelings towards his team that may have been induced by interactions with his former coach, assistant coach, friends, colleagues or spouse. With a supervisor or psychoanalyst, a coach has time to talk freely and at length about his aggression. In this case, induced feelings from work with his group were so severe that Dan had many murderous thoughts and feelings. Fourth, since an individual prescription is required to help each player and no formula is guaranteed to produce success, a coach can use supervision to design proper interventions to work with individual members. After a fifth, a coach can gain from supervision and understanding of his/her players’ communication and behavior.
Session 6: In this hour, the second of the sampled sessions, Dan talked about how stupid some of his players were. He was not only enraged at them but had acted on his aggressive feelings. He reported that he felt hopeless because they were not paying attention to him. He took the position that it was their fault that they were not learning. I said that this might be true, but sometimes I had found that a student did not learn because a teacher did not find an effective way to teach him.
Nevertheless, Dan complained, “This is not a bright team. They make the same errors they made the first week of training.” He had only trained them for a month but had already judged how fast they should learn. He was impatient, hopeless, bored, enraged, and disillusioned.
Often what he called a lack of intelligence was their resistance to performing his way: “I cut a guy last week who was a good player but unintelligent. He had an attitude of doing me a favor. I thought he had a chip on his shoulder.” Dan did not understand that his player may have needed this attitude to survive in the past, and that his defensiveness was not necessarily bad. He then described a forward who just did not feel like playing. I asked Dan, “What would motivate him?” Dan said he did not know. The player had told him he was just tired of making the same mistakes. Dan had not asked him why he felt that. Instead, he countered with, “How do you think I feel?” Dan did not want to listen; he preferred to talk. I discovered that Dan wanted players to do what he wanted to do; he did not want to hear “excuses” or “explanations”. Since Dan had resistance to knowing the meaning of his players’ behavior, he experienced it as a personal affront. Dan may have been feeling frightened, overwhelmed, or inadequate, or maybe he simply never thought in psychological terms, but he acted as if he did not care.
He reported that he had finally ordered his players to write logs as punishment, as a homework assignment. He said he was very angry at their weekend game: “They looked lousy and weren’t concentrating. I told them they had a cumulative IQ of 4. The next day, I apologized and said I had overestimated them. I felt better for yelling.” In the logs, the players did not admit they were angry at him because they feared his retaliation. Half the logs were positive,” he noted. I inquired, “So you feel positive is good?” He agreed. I observed he did not value or welcome the expression of negative feelings. However, the logs had given him some good ideas for strategy and motivation in a game. Dan added that the team was feeling depressed, but it was “nothing a win wouldn’t cure.” He was unaware that depression often signified repressed anger, anger directed against the self. Like most of us, he thought that an external event could shift their mood, and while it might temporarily, what was actually needed was a full and regular expression of their rage.
Generally, his team was a defiant group, but their defiance was passively expressed. Dan wanted them to work cooperatively for the team’s success, but each would come out on the floor with an individual plan. He wanted them to pass the ball to increase the chances for a good play, and no matter how often he told them that, they tended to get out of control and do what they wanted. As one person became selfish and uncooperative, they all became uncooperative. I understood that there was a group collusion to ignore the team’s goals in favor of individual goals. I told him to suggest to the team that when each player got the ball, he should take the ball and try to do whatever he could. (In modern psychoanalytic parlance, this strategy is called “joining the resistance.”} In other words, I wanted the team to stop silently opposing him. By joining their defiance, Dan could force them to oppose his new instruction to act selfishly in the game, thereby eliciting the teamwork he had sought from the start.
And I had a hunch that the team’s defiance represented a withholding of gratification from the coach and each other. To give an insight into the control struggle, I questioned, “Do you think it’s clear to your players that when you don’t win, you still like them, and you enjoy being with them and learning from them? Even when you get angry do they know you still like them? He admitted he had not yet told them, but he liked the idea. I added, “if they feel someone cares about them only when they produce, they might not produce.” If you convey this message to the team, you may not win, but your lives together will be more meaningful.”
Session 11: I had a rare opportunity in this third sampled hour to reflect on some of his behavior with his team and thereby to model another way to deal with the universal problem of absenteeism. Dan had missed a session with me. At our next meeting, I joked, “Maybe I should suspend you.” He laughed and told me sarcastically, “Our meeting slipped my mind. Maybe you should charge me an extra fee (there was no fee). If one of his players had said this to Dan, he would have thrown him off the team. Dan added that he was too busy with other things. He had had a few weeks off between semesters and must have unconsciously wanted to be rid of all responsibility. I inquired, “How do the players remember their appointment.” Dan answered, “That is a good question. I hope you they write them down.” Often coaches set up practice for different times during the week; college players often hold part-time jobs and sometimes have no system to organize their tasks. I modeled for him an investigative manner – finding out what was happening with a player before going into punitive action. This might reduce the possibility of his acting on his rage.
But he expressed a lack of understanding of the investigative process itself. I asked him if he could consult me, his supervisor, when he did not understand a player’s behavior and before he acted punitively. Otherwise, the player behaved impulsively, and so did he. Dan did not want to do anything to alter his style. Like the players, he rejected any attempt to regulate his acting out. He repeatedly demonstrated two major resistances – ignorance and his wish to remain so. He never found out why a player needed to get kicked off his team. He asked player needed to be kicked off his team. He asked players to leave without knowing the effects of that action on the team (who had witnessed a murder of sorts) and on the player who had to live forever with his failure. The coach was impulsive and so were the players.
Session 16: The last sampled session occurred toward the end of the basketball season. After 15 hours with Dan, I knew that Dan has a strong sense of right and wrong, but he is often behind rules and discipline as a defense against his rage. He was a competent, dedicated coach who encountered problems because he did not understand group dynamics. He did not know that he first had to deal with his players’ blocks before he could get them to be consistently cooperative with each other. I tried to communicate to Dan that there were elements other than skill and conditioning that were a valid part of the group experience. While winning was very important to the team process, it could not be the only focus because it was not what a team always did.
In his session, I once again modeled for him a way to handle players who broke rules. Because he was unconsciously reluctant to surrender an opportunity to express rage at his players – this remained one of his weakest coaching skills. I repeated, “Would it be possible to ask them why they broke the rules? Could they help you understand that? Was it their way of getting attention? “ I focused on how to work with the group on the issue of lateness, for example. I suggested he say to his team, “I noticed John always comes late, and you guys never say anything about it. Is it all right that he continues to do this?” In addition to discovering the player’s reason for coming late, by exploring Dan could investigate his team’s investment in having the player come late. Were they glad when he was late for practice so that they would have more class time and attention for themselves? Were they vicariously enjoying his acting out because they themselves would like to do the same? These were questions I noted to which an effective coach would want answers.
I had not yet another discussion with him about having his team write logs. He did not want to write – he was too wordy; it took too much time, and his work had to be perfect when writing. We had this interchange: Ed: “You agreed to let me supervise you. Why didn’t you have them do the logs?” Dan: I don’t know. (He was unwilling to keep the contract with me about being supervised). You are not paying my salary, so I don’t have to do it. There was a parallel here between him and players who did not take the sport seriously and who said, “This is not a class, and you are not giving me a grade.”) I only want to do what I like to do.
He admitted that he had had the thought, “Who does this guy think he is?” He did not want to tell me that because he would have to explain it fully. His players said that he did not want to write. I told Dan that he offered him an opportunity to explore with them why they could not do what they did not want to do, and then he shifted the discussion to examining how they resisted taking his order when they played. “You would be teaching them how to survive in the real world.”
Dan inquired, “But how will making them do petty work help them? If they’re angry about writing…. I need a happy team that is together. “Happy?” I corrected. You need players who are angry and have their aggressive energy available to them.” He wanted to compliment everyone and give positive feedback instead of capitalizing on the rage and competition among group members, and he wanted to have a “nice” group. But his players were angry, hostile – not sweet and lovable. They were going to fight the enemy. They needed their anger. A coach should not take that away with compliments. He finally revealed that he feared that if he released their aggressive energy. He finally revealed that he feared that if he released their aggressive energy, they would kill the general (him) rather than the enemy (the other team).
Dan defined success by whether the players followed his rules. But his rules boxed him in. He could not investigate their resistance to following rules, so he eliminated them. He said, “I’d be angry if I didn’t have any rules.” He used his aggression destructively; he felt so out of control that he needed rules. He was more afraid of his anger than theirs.
Evaluation: Several years after Dan and I finished our supervision, I scheduled a follow-up session to determine the effects of our interaction. We met for fifty minutes at his home because he had broken his leg the week before. I had prepared a brief series of questions to ask him. I asked if anything had been beneficial. He said immediately that all of it had been “particularly helpful.” He said it had occurred in a stressful period– his mother had been seriously ill, his team’s talent that year had been especially weak, and his best friend, who usually listens to him, was in Europe. It helped him “get his anxieties and anger out.” I asked if he thought a coach needed a best friend or spouse. He agreed. I noted, “He has to wind down, but friends often come and go. I have a feeling that what we did would benefit most coaches. Basketball coaches try to deal with 12 to 25 personalities. They keep too much inside themselves. In a supervisory situation, a coach can vent or express rage or negative feelings.” He claimed that “the value of the experience was being able to talk with someone I respected.” For example, I was able to talk to someone I respected. For example, I could talk it out if a player was using drugs. Usually, my first reaction is rage.” In other words, he found that the supervision had helped him with his aggressive impulsivity.
Had he used my interventions with his secret teams that we had talked about years before? He answered, “I am much, much, more relaxed. I don’t take the game home.” This improvement in his functioning could not be attributed to the supervision, but in Dan’s mind, there was a connection. He added that it was “not as distasteful to cut anyone. I am owning up to the responsibility.” I interpreted to him that he was allowing himself to have negative feelings but was acting appropriately for the benefit of the team. He concurred, “I talk more to players every day.” He was encouraging them to talk to him as well. He told them, “If you have problems, we talk about them.” The team “had also written things twice that season,” but he was not using log-cards. He was giving a guided questionnaire, an idea he had gotten from another coach. I sensed that perhaps I had made an error because I had not requested that he do logs, and therefore, he did not have firsthand experience of their special benefit.
I asked Dan to describe the limitations of our supervision. He said he had felt overburdened. It had been hard for him to make the meetings. A coach’s life is indeed very burdened. If he does the job right, twenty-four a day is not enough time. If he is fully involved in the process, he is reliving games, reliving negative interactions, and thinking about how to get more talented players. Dan “disliked the regimentation of our meetings, the feeling that he had to do it.” He said he would have preferred it if he could have spoken to me as needed rather than regular appointments. “It was a non-threatening situation,” he remarked, “I still felt it was like going to the dentist. I had to go there.” Still, he communicated that he and his teams had profited from modern analytic supervision. His performance and that of his players, past and present, had improved.
I offered him a few insights about coaching in general. I wanted to present the idea that a coach can use options other than what first comes to mind. A coach has to determine how much praise players want and how much criticism he wants. When does the team want to peak during the season? I summarize my theory by saying, “A coach has options for talking to players limited by his background, creativity, experiences being coached, his intuition, sensitivity, percentage, and the situations with which he has had to deal. The most enraging thing for a coach is when his team goes out and plays any old way. He wants them to play, as he wants them to play. Rather than being enraged and yelling at his players, though, he can find in this unparalleled opportunities to talk about psychodynamic aspects that interfere with his players’ correct performance.
