Volleyball Coaching Life-What Happened at BYU

Reports detailing the racist incidence that occurred during the volleyball match between Duke University and Brigham Young University has been all over a frenzied social media. There have been factual statements, and there have been fanciful third person recounting.

The facts are out there, mixed in with too much conjecture, supposition, extrapolation, and biased interpretations. We will get to the true sequence of events somewhere down the line; I hope, stripped of the coloring from individuals with agendas.

Here is what I think I know.

·       Rachel Richardson is the 19-year-old black female athlete that was undeservedly subjected to a racist tirade from a person who is not a student at BYU yet who sat in the student section of the BYU gym.

·       This person spewed the N word towards Ms. Richardson every time she came back to to serve.

·       Ms. Richardson notified her coach.

·       The event staff placed a police officer in front of the student section, but the person was not removed immediately because no one would nor could identify the person who spewed the racist words.

·       I don't know what the Duke bench saw or heard or when she heard it.

·       At the end of the match, the offending person tried to approach and address the Duke bench. That was when Ms. Richardson identified the voice, the event staff threw this person out of the arena and announced that he was banned.

·       The BYU athletic director addressed the BYU crowd the following day prior to the scheduled matches. The footage can be seen on Twitter.

·       Several Tweets went back and forth amongst many people, I don’t know the timeline so I will just let people go track it down on their own.

·       The next match that involved Duke, (playing against Rider) was moved from the arena and the match was played quietly, away from the spotlight with restricted admissions because Duke volleyball had asked for the accommodation.

In the aftermath incidence, there were massive amounts of discussions, debates, and heated arguments in the college volleyball bulletin boards and Facebook pages. I have also privately exchange texts with people who coach volleyball. The general consensus from the coaches is first, something like this should never have happened; second, there were  massive failures in how the situation was handled. What is not a consensus is how the failures could have been avoided and what would be the right thing to do.

This is what I wish to explore.

To reiterate, I am not privy to any more information than anyone else. I don’t know anyone on either coaching staff or people who are directly associated with either Duke or BYU athletics. I am not prescient in plumbing the depths of the minds of anyone involved. I am, however, a college volleyball fan and a volleyball coach, one that is very far removed from the rarified airs of the division 1 college volleyball programs. A very interested observer trying to align what happened with what I believe to be the right and moral principles which should have guided the decision making. All suppositions and mine and mine alone.

At the most basic, there is the athlete: Rachel Richardson. A 19-year-old starter on the Duke volleyball team.

My instincts as a coach tells me that my first and foremost responsibility is to protect all my players from unnecessary and dangerous circumstances. This incidence falls into that category. Some argued that a coach cannot and should not protect players from everything, that this was a potential learning experience.

I call BS.

No one should ever have to deal with this level of ignorance and hatred Period. This is not being able to gut out sprints, this is navigating the unveiled hatred being directed at a woman who is just coming of age. That argument is spurious. Stating this belief reveals the underlying prejudices in the speaker’s mindset: they are assuming this kind of hatred is and should be the norm, that as a person of color, Ms. Richardson represents those that need to “get used to” this kind of confrontation because this is and will always be the norm in our society. I vehemently dispute that, even though this may be more a part of our reality than I desire, but I will never accept it as the norm. This mindset usually originates with those who are accustomed to being in the dominant position,  of being in the majority all of their conscious life because they have never had to suffer through the shame of being told that their feeling do not matter and that they are not the norm.

As a coach, I have always believed  a coach’s responsibilities to all their players goes beyond the teacher-student relationship. Club and high school coaches are tasked by the athlete’s family with  teaching and molding her in all respects or life: physical, mental, intellectual, and emotional. College coaches have the added responsibility of guiding their players through the formative years of life, years of learning to make critical decisions, of maturing into a sentient being as a well developing into a responsible adult. These athletes are learning to integrate all the overloaded sensory experience  an athlete is exposed to while placed in the pressure cooker that is intercollegiate athletics.

The added responsibility on the college coach is onerous and intimidating. It takes a special leader, teacher, coach, mentor, and many times surrogate parent to accept that mantle. I never coached in college, but I respect the college coaches I know as people who are not only willing to accept the responsibility but are eager to step into the position with passion. The position is never taken up with dread; it is taken with a sense of nobility and reverence for the job that they are about to embrace with every one of their athletes. In this case, I had assumed that the guardian for these athletes would act with the urgency that the situation demanded.

I have spoken to a few coaches from different levels of collegiate volleyball; to a one, they knew what their first reaction would be: pull the team off the court until the situation is stabilized and their athletes, their charges, and their future colleagues are protected. They also, in deference to their pragmatic impulses, admit that they don’t know if they have the courage to follow through on that action, because intercollegiate athletics is complicated, involving an inordinate amount of moving parts. They admitted that they didn’t know if they can retain their purity of purpose while negotiating the quagmire of the many levels of decision making that are imposed on them. But to a one, they say, they hoped that they would and could.

Moving to the broader subject of the institution, the university. We know that intercollegiate athletics is big business and optics are of utmost importance to the institutions, which is what we cynically assume to be of the highest priority for the university. But the athletes are ostensibly why there are intercollegiate athletics, the institutions field athletic to take up the responsibility of educating the younger generation, to guide them, and the teach them how to deal with real life. It is a mission that is similar to the mission for the coach, except the institution’s mission is both more broad and more in depth in scope. The institution has promised to  shoulder the responsibility of protecting and caring for all their athletes.

Speaking in human terms, the universities think of the athletes that they have representing their universities as a part of the family, a term that is often overused by the representatives of the institutions while the athletes are being recruited to those institutions. The institution often speaks of those athletes, as the living and breathing embodiment of the core spirit of the institution. Yet  with great benefit comes great responsibility, not the least of which is the responsibility to protect them, and more importantly to demonstrate the character and integrity the institutions seek to embody by example.

The third and last layer is the broader volleyball community. This includes all the players, coaches, fans, and media that love this sport. We have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of the sport and to do so with our minds focused on the welfare of everyone who are involved.

We, as the greater volleyball community benefit from being able to watch skilled and talented athletes compete and perform for our enjoyment, to indulge us in our addiction and love of the sport. In return, we are implicitly requested to protect them from overt acts which will absolutely impact their mental and physical health. It is the least we can do for those who are young and talented enough to give shape to what we understand to be the epitome of our beloved sport. Yet in this case, no one within that small community thought clearly enough to volunteer the facts of who, what, and how. The volleyball community sat silent as the person who is doing her part to indulge us in our love of volleyball is made to feel insulted, unloved, and unsafe.

Looking back on the three layers of responsibilities, all three layers failed in protecting Ms. Richardson. All three layers decided instead to practice group think, to act as the ostrich, to rationalize the inaction by diminishing the suffering of a fellow human being, to abdicate our responsibilities to an athlete, a member of our institutional family, and a beloved part of our volleyball community.

This story will no doubt play itself out in the media, and then disappear into the ether as so much of the other once urgent events had disappeared. We humans have short attention span, it is quite convenient that way, to better assuage what minimal guilt we may feel in our hearts over the suffering that Ms. Richardson has had to endure.

Yet, can we, as coaches, institutions, and community afford to let the event disappear quietly?  A tragedy is for naught if it fails to teach necessary lessons. Failures are wasted if no one acts to urgently prevent it from repeating itself in the future.

Will we learn the lessons? Most importantly, will we commit ourselves to actions that creates change from those lessons? Will the individuals, the institutions, and the community pay attention long enough to actively prevent the next time? In that regard, I would say that I am neutral in the optimism department, but I can still be hopeful because we are talking about volleyball people. My people. My sport. My community.

Doing the right thing isn’t the easy thing, it is the only thing.