Yes, absolutely. Thank you for that question.
Again, we have incredible researchers on this panel who have done the numbers and the science behind this. Mine comes from the first-hand experience of standing in auditoriums full of football coaches bearing down on me with their arms crossed, and saying, “Who are you to tell us we can't run suicides anymore?”
I'll just speak from that first-hand experience where what I see, when it comes to coaching, we would now probably consider, depending on the severity of it, as psychological abuse—the yelling, the berating and the toughen-up method of yelling at children to do better.
Children do not have the ability to separate who they are from what is happening on the ice or on the field. What we know now, in my understanding, is that we are traumatizing that child's brain much like a concussion when we are yelling and screaming at them. As a coach and as an athlete, I was yelled and screamed at, and that was just normalized back then.
I wish I had a magic answer, but it's actually looking at each individual sport and the behaviours that are paramount in that sport. Ice hockey is the perfect example of where I do see a lot of psychological maltreatment with the coaching style.
The other thing I work with coaches on is the reality. I just want to share that we're working with generation Z athletes now, who are age 12 to 25, primarily. They don't even respond to negative reinforcement coaching. The example I use is that when we know better we do better, because not only do we understand, I believe, more about what trauma is, but we also understand that we're dealing with a new generation of athletes who adapt and respond differently.
The last thing I'll share, if I may, is that when it comes to something like, say, running of “suicides” or hockey bag skating, now that those are considered a form of punishment, we have to look at where that starts, because there is a progression of harm. If coaches are just making athletes drop and do 20 push-ups, would that be considered an egregious case of maltreatment? Likely not. But can that easily progress to children skating around in a circle on the ice until one child vomits in a garbage can, which is quite common? Absolutely, it can.
That's when I mention that we need to eliminate the beginnings of the microaggressions and the conditions where more egregious abuse can occur. And that, unfortunately, will not be covered in your online training. It needs to be very much resourced in every single organization across this country.