Like many Canadian kids, I played and watched lots of hockey. I coached as well for many years when my kids played. Even in kids’ hockey there was a particular hockey culture evident.
My experience playing and coaching was largely positive. I saw how sports such as hockey can demonstrate the positive value of teamwork, co-operation, the blessing of learning to lose well, the blessing of learning to win well.
The negative side of hockey culture was also evident. It wasn’t that long ago that I coached, but even then, and even in kids’ hockey, I saw that some coaches sought to motivate their team by yelling at the players, by demeaning them.
The roots of this style of coaching and this idea of what it means to motivate people come from a particular way of seeing the world that is often present in sports. The way of seeing, of understanding, of making sense, can be called a “pedagogy.” Your pedagogy is your theory of learning.
Do you think that people learn and grow by positive motivation or by negative motivation? Hockey, and many other sports have been dominated for decades by, what writer Alice Miller (writing about childhood) calls, a “poisonous pedagogy”.
This past week in Vancouver, the coach of the NHL team, the Vancouver Canucks, was fired. Bruce Boudreau is, by all accounts, a fantastic person. He is compassionate and funny and engaging and he, apparently, genuinely likes people. He does not take himself seriously, but he has been a highly successful coach in the NHL, near the top of the all-time list in wins and winning percentage. His firing was handled terribly by the team management and ownership, so much so, that it made national news and international sports news.
It became common knowledge that he was going to to be fired, but he was kept in place for weeks. The atmosphere around the team became depressed and the team lost more and more games. Fans at the final two home games that Boudreau coached knew that he was going to be let go after the Saturday night game. The Canucks lost that game too, and even though they are having a terrible season, the fans at the game cheered. They cheered for Bruce Boudreau. The most popular cheer during Boudreau’s year and a bit as coach, a cheer not about a player or the team on the ice, but a cheer about the coach - “Bruce, there it is!” - in gratitude for and solidarity with a coach who turned the team around, until the management started making it clear that they wanted another “tougher” coach. The fans, even though the team was losing, knew that the blame was not with the coach, but with management and ownership.
What you have in this contrast is conflicting pedagogy. One side, the ownership and management, seem to think that motivation comes by toughness, aggression, from a coach who is willing to berate players. The other side, the fans, sees that Boudreau had been able to motivate the team by being positive and helping the players to see their strengths.
This contrast is visible in very many areas other than hockey. You may have seen it in business and work. Have you ever had a boss who sought to motivate by fear and by berating employees? Models of parenting have, until fairly recently in history, been dominated by a poisonous pedagogy, treating the child as opponent, as naturally terrible and willful in a way that must be broken. In religious circles, poisonous pedagogy is present wherever you hear terms like “tough love.” Religious people and religious leaders can come to understand God in these terms, as if God is always shaking his head at humanity and as if our primary motivation in faith is terror and disdainful judgment.
The Canucks have a new coach now. He is someone who is known as much “tougher” than Boudreau in terms of how he aims to motivate. Unlike Boudreau, the new coach has never had a winning record. His teams have always lost more games than they have won. He talks a lot about “imposing a structure” and getting the best from “my players.” I read one report that the ownership and management had approached a different person as potential coach, an even tougher guy. This is a former NHL coach who was let go from a team because he was verbally and otherwise abusive to players. He famously pitted players against each other and created an atmosphere of fear. This used to be more commonplace, but it must have been quite bad in this instance because, to this day, some coaches are still rewarded for such a style.
I read a news story about a study recently that addressed the question of what makes people feel most happy and fulfilled in life. Judging from how we order our educational and work lives you might assume that it is money, but it is not. It turns out that meaningful, healthy relationships are what correlate most to life satisfaction and happiness. So why are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and even Donald Trump) considered as heroes by so many people? Are they successes in life? By what measure?
The owners of the Vancouver Canucks are a family that is well known in this part of the world for being really good at making, and ordering life around, money. It seems to be that they have also picked up the poisonous pedagogy so evident in our culture. Poisonous pedagogy can work for making money, but not for building relationships.
Years ago, when I first started liking and playing hockey as a kid, I lived in Toronto and cheered wholeheartedly for the Toronto Maple Leafs. This would have been in the mid to late 1970’s. The Leafs last won a Stanley Cup in 1967. In 1969 they were purchased by the infamous Harold Ballard. Ballard loved money, apparently, as much as the current owners of the Canucks do now. The team, which should have won multiple cups, suffered. There is a documentary out right now about Ballard and the Leafs. Jason Priestley (with whom I graduated high school) made the documentary and it’s really good. Jason, by the way, was also a good hockey player.
When I cheered most vociferously for the Leafs, their coach was another nice guy named Roger Nielson. Like the Aquilinis (Canuck owners), Ballard didn’t have much regard for nice guys and, in a losing skid, Ballard promptly fired Nielson. I recall two things after that. One, the fan base was really upset. Like in Vancouver today, the fans knew where the rot was, it it wasn’t with Nielson (or Boudreau). Two, Ballard couldn’t find a coach who was willing to work for him. A few days after firing Roger Nielson, Ballard re-hired him. Later, it was Roger Nielson who started the waving of the white towel phenomenon at arenas. During a game that he felt was terribly officiated, he tied a towel to the end of a hockey stick and raised it in the air in an act of surrender. Nice guys, Bruce Boudreau included, can still be sarcastic and funny.
That the fans in Vancouver showed respect and gratitude for Boudreau is encouraging. It could be a sign of hope that we are moving away from poisonous pedagogy, even in sports. Likely though, it will take a while yet.
We could ask ourselves where we hold onto the idea that the way to motivate people is by fear and disdain and attack. Perhaps, it is time to grow up. Perhaps, Bruce Boudreau shows us not just the good of coaching, but the good of humanity. That’s more than can be currently said for Canucks ownership and management.
Well said Todd. I am not a fan of contact (combat) sports nor do I favor bad behavior so my children swam and danced and excelled in the Arts. They both have careers in Service. I do have family and friends who pay huge amounts of money to sit in arenas cheering while sports players are willing to risk life and limb to outdo one another. Myself, I don’t foresee change. As long as fans will support bad behavior and players will abide aggressive, unfair coaching, the status quo will continue.
Why do teams allow themselves to be abused….do coaches really have that much power?
If we don’t feel that we deserve respect we won’t get it….pretty basic.