Mommy's Boy

I wrote "Women's Team Room" across the top of our white board. As more issues occurred among the guys, I started decorating the board with flowers. Eventually, I colored the flowers in. It felt like I was coaching a bunch of little girls.

My first year of coaching was brutal. I spent way more time putting out fires than actually going over Xs and Os. It was totally unexpected. Guys would start false rumors about teammates, then deny it vehemently when they were confronted. The guys who were getting playing time didn't talk to the guys that didn't play. One player went as far as making it his business to get with women his teammates expressed any sort of interest in. I had never seen men behave this way until I started coaching.

After a few months of the nonsense, I erased "Women's Team Room" and all the flowers from the board. It was a poor strategy on my part to get them to behave like "men." Few of them really respected women based on their interactions with them, and I was only fueling that fire by suggesting that all women embody petty behavior.

Even though I had erased the intended slight from the board, I still couldn't understand why they behaved as they did. With each year that passed, I continued to encounter the same antics from different players. From my own vantage point, they didn't act like men. It took a few years for me to wrap my mind around the possible reason for their boy-ish antics.

Recently, I decided to send a mass text to a bunch of my players asking them to identify a male role model. All of them replied similarly, but one particular response stood out.

Me: Tell me who your male role model is and why?
Stumps: I don't have one.
Me: You gotta have at least one. How about your dad?
Stumps: Don't know him.
Me: You don't have any uncles or cousins that you look up to?
Stumps: Honestly no.
Me: A coach?
Stumps: No. My mom is all I ever looked up to. Men never held me down like that.