Push Up, Pull Up But Do Not Give Up

Many sports coaches believe that athletes excel through tough training. They reason that the more aggressive and relentless the training, the more focused and stronger the athlete.

There is no room for weakness, coaches would say over and over.

Athletes who are exposed to this from a young age suffer mental health issues and their performance may deteriorate.

According to the Arizona-based Child Help Organisation, a national non-profit organisation that combats child abuse, up to 50 percent of athletes experienced bullying or harassment in training.

Four percent of these young athletes have reported being physically abused by their coaches in several ways, such as being hit or slapped.

A.W, a 22-year-old handball player at the Heliopolis Sporting Club, told The Caravan that after his first training, his perspective on sports completely changed.

AW described his first training to be a lesson in discipline to obey the coach’s commands.

“In my first training, I was shouted at or beaten up every time I lost control of the ball,” AW said.

The current dynamics of sports give coaches a certain psychological power over their trainees, which some often abuse.

A certified member of The German Academy of Applied Sports, an academy specialized in sports medicine, Mohab Fouad told The Caravan that “there are some cultures that use bullying and aggression in training”.

“It sometimes leads their athletes to become successful in their field. However, most of them become mentally unstable and abuse drugs,” Fouad added.

Fouad believes that when children get bullied in training, be it from their coaches or their peers, they end up avoiding that sport, neglecting social interactions, or eventually falling into depression and trauma.

“When I was younger, I was forced to go to swimming training. There is an ideology in Egypt that when we get hit, we train. I used to see the girls playing water ballet get insulted and hit by their coach, and nobody objected,”  MICT senior HN told The Caravan.

But there is a difference between a tough coach who pushes his athletes to do their best and a bully who belittles them, according to Fouad.

“There are some sports that require a high level of aggression and motivation, such as boxing and mixed martial arts, to make the athlete more determined as they go into a fight. Some may refer to this as bullying but its not, ” he argued.

But such treatment should be monitored and approached carefully, especially in the case of children.

“Children are pure; they [have not yet] experienced social and cultural pressure and they can’t make correct judgments. Any negative feedback they receive might be perceived in a harmful way, and therefore coaches must take care of their actions when they are dealing with them,” Fouad added.

Fouad, who is also the founder of Build & Burn Gym, has seen extremely negative outcomes when a coach bullies a client.

The harsh treatment young athletes receive from coaches, undermines their self-esteem and their skills.

“There was a girl that came to the gym and she became a member, and she was very excited to transform her body,” he says.

She soon stopped coming to the gym.

“Turns out that the coach training her was making fun of her weak points and giving her negative comments, and I didn’t accept that,” he said.

In most cases, people choose to play a certain sport because they are passionate about it. However, when they find themselves getting bullied by their own coaches they get extremely discouraged and they stop going to training altogether. Sometimes, it leads to violence off the field.

In the article “Prehistoric college football coaches are killing players. It’s past time to stop them”, published by The Washington Post, a college student was forced to run in severely hot weather which resulted in his body temperature reaching 106 degrees, eventually leading to his death.

Chairman of Nutrigenomix Middle East, a start-up providing nutritional assessment at the University of Toronto, Professor Mohamed Khedr, emphasized the importance of lack of aggression in sports.

“Mohamed Ali was well known for his sportsmanship. I strongly urge all trainers never to bully in training; it prevents the athlete from being able to use his mind. Trainers should use knowledge and strategic planning to enhance the performance of their athletes,” Khedr stated.