Coach! How too much emphasis on winning negatively effects athletes wellbeing and how you can achieve high performing and happiness in your team

In this article I will talk about how does emphasis on victory influence the individual athlete's well-being, and what is the implication for managing hockey teams and sport organizations? And how high performance and happiness can be achieved at the same time.

Let’s start our examination by looking at youth sports and then move to the college level, so we’ll understand the whole picture.

In this discussion, I will focus on ice hockey because every sport has its own nuances that affect the culture. I’ll argue how winning and the individual athlete’s well-being can co-exist and discuss how this can be done in practice.

Generally speaking, in youth sports, the only person whose future winning could affect is the coach. For the individual athlete, it rarely matters, especially in team sports such as ice hockey. For example, in ice hockey, nobody cares whether your youth team won anything or not. How good you are is what really matters when moving up in the career ladder. However, everyone needs some level of victories to keep going. If you always lose or you are one of the last ones, it affects motivation. So, I’m not saying it’s should always be about “everyone plays, not matter the situation” and that kids should not be pushed to be better. But I’m sure you know those coaches who are always screaming and teams where top two lines play most of the time and one goalie gets 90% of the games. That makes no sense.

The ground for expectation and culture is laid during the youth years and in high school before college. In ice hockey, the culture of the team varies a lot depending on who the coach is. As in the article by Caulfield, J.L., Lee, F.K. & Baird, C.A. Navigating the Ethically Complex and Controversial World of College Athletics: A Humanistic Leadership Approach to Student Athlete Well-Being. J Bus Ethics 183, 603–617 (2023), it is discussed that the coach is a dominant actor who has enormous power over the culture. In youth sports, emphasis on winning is often caused due to parent coaches being at the peak of their sports career. For them, winning a local area championship can be the greatest thing they’ll ever achieve in their sports career, so they behave like they are coaching a pro team. Many parents who are not coaches put lots of money and time into their kids’ careers so they could fulfill their own sports dreams and be admired by other parents. In sports where the kid is the family’s only hope to get out of poverty, the motivation drivers are different, but in ice hockey, for parents, it is often wanting admiration of others that causes too great an emphasis on winning.

The culture that emphasizes only winning and results starts shaping the individual player at a young age. Many players grow up learning that their value is determined by their performance, and in the team better players are more valued. These individuals grow up to value other people that way too, and in my opinion, this is one of the main reasons why many athletes are not very nice people.

When players reach high school age, their coaches are usually either at the beginning of their coaching careers or older coaches who are at the peak of their coaching careers. In both cases, winning matters to them a lot. Therefore, the same winning and results-oriented culture continues that was started at the youth level. At this point, the average hockey player has been playing for about 10 years already and lived in this culture for most of their lives, so that’s what they are used to and can’t really even think of any other way. As in the article by Caulfield, J.L., Lee, F.K. & Baird, C.A., it was said by a player in the interview that they don’t want a white-collar coach, instead, more rugged like their old coach, who was fired for misbehavior. That is a great example of when you live in a certain type of world for so long, it’s hard to imagine anything else, and it becomes normal to you.

In college sports, athletes have been considered amateurs, but we are talking about big money and pro coaches who are making hunderds of thousands dollars or millions depending on the sport. Their jobs are on the line. Jobs that pay their mortgage and bring food to the table. If you’d ask any pro coach whose job security is measured by results if they care more about how players are feeling or about whether their own family has a roof over their head, not many are willing to sacrifice their own family’s well-being over an athlete who they may barely know. If a coach doesn’t know any other way to lead than authoritarian fear, then he is not going to change.

In ice hockey, college head coaches can make more money than assistant coaches in the NHL and more than many pro league head coaches. The money involved, especially at the NCAA D1 level, is so big that in order to keep your coaching job and even the program going, you have to win. This creates a big dilemma not just in college level but all levels: If we want to keep our jobs and the program running, we need to win, but if we emphasise winning too much, it can negatively affect the well-being of the players. That is why we can’t look at the world as black-and-white and say that we should not focus on winning. After all we play to win.

Winning and well-being don’t have to be in separate sentences. The culture can emphasise victory while promoting the player’s well-being, happiness, team spirit, community service, and many other so-called “soft values” at the same time. How can this be possible? Start with the “inside-out approach." In practice, it means when many individuals are doing well, the team will do well. So as a coach, you want to understand that if a player is happy/content (happiness vs content would be its own topic), his/her life is in balance, and he/she feels like they are going forward in life, it will produce better results on the ice. From a player's perspective, this means understanding who you are, why you do play, what your goals in life are, what makes you happy, etc.

From a coaching perspective, I’d be asking questions such as: how can I maximize this player’s short-term and long-term development while getting results as a team now? How can I help him/her cope with life outside of the rink and give tools not just for the sport but for life also because there is no work-life balance, just life?

We have to understand that life and sports are a constant balancing act. There may be short moments of quiet, but trying to achieve some kind of continuous effortless happiness is a fairytale. Life is hard and rugged, and finding the balance is a daily task.

In hockey, sports managers have lots of power over the whole culture. If managers can create an organization with an emotionally safe environment for coaches, and coaches can do it for players, the whole organization will have higher chances of long-term success (success also produces happiness since who wants to be losing all the time). At the end, what is the point of winning if your life is miserable and you have become a person you don’t like to see in the mirror?

Managers and coaches have enormous power over athletes' lives in hockey and in any other sport, especially in team sports because you can’t do the sport unless you are in the team. I’d argue that in college sports, the head of the athletic department has even greater power than the coaches because athletic department managers do the hiring, firing, and evaluation of any mistreatment. As stated in the articles mentioned previously, organizations have been covering up bad things that have been going on. And why does that happen? Again, money is the reason because athletic department managers’ bonuses can be tied to results, just as coaches' results are. Boards of directors want results and a good public image.

I’d say in college ice hockey, as well as in other organizations, there must be strong leaders who don’t care too much about what other people think in the chain of command. There needs to be people who are not afraid of losing their jobs if it means doing the right thing. And in this case, by the “right thing,” I mean doing what is best for the athlete, even if it would not be the optimal option for the organization. Problems arise when people believe in doing what is best for the organization/company (which is actually just imaginary entity without feelings), even if it means sacrificing individuals and members of the team.

I’ll leave you with this summary based on my personal experiences: Creating an emotionally safe environment is the foundation where emphasis on winning and athlete’s well-being can co-exist. I’d also like you to ask yourself: When I achieve my goal(s), how does my life look like, and what do I need to do in order to get there? When your daily life during the journey is in line with your values, you’ll have a chance to get to the goals, even if the goal would be very hard to achieve, and you’ll also have a chance to be happy while getting there.