The Athlete Centered Approach

Athlete-centred means:

• Placing the needs of the athlete before the interests of the parents, club, school or coach.
• All athletes are welcome to participate, are valued and encouraged to explore their own potential.
• Recognise the importance of providing a fun and safe environment.
• Encourage athletes to be involved in their own development and empowered to take greater responsibility for it.

UK Athletics Coaches Manual, Level 1.

This brings the coach/athlete relationship centre stage. For many athletes, this is the pressure point at which gender becomes an immediate and personal issue in their sport, and different athletes will have different levels of consciousness about it. Fig 5 (How We See Ourselves) outlines the basics of gender role identification and gender differences in the use of language. The latter is taken from the work of Deborah Tannen, an American professor of linguistics, but numerous researchers in sport have reached similar conclusions. The implications of this are addressed in chapter 3.

Figure 5 - How We See Ourselves

Gender Role Identification:
Girls: from their primary care-giver (mother)
Boys: by disengagement from primary care-giver

So, self concept for females is formed and much more likely to be maintained via relationships. Self-concept for males involves seperation and independence.

Females are much more likely to grow up with a strong sense of their ties to other people and to value relationships.

Seperate studies show that men and women value and use verbal communication differently. There are three purposes to conversation:

• The exchange of information
• To establish rapport and connection with people
• To establish hierarchy and independence

Males tend to value the first and last, females rapport and connection. This has strong implications for female self-esteem.

Figure 6 (The Systematic Effects of Gender Relations) reflects the same issues, but at a sociological or political level.

The Systematic Effects of Gender Relations

Male-Female relations are structured similarly in most social institutions. (Norms, mores, laws, rules, manners, assumptions, habits, individual, group and community behaviour, thinking, culture, self-concepts insistutionalised structures, history, repetition)

Connell, Ashenden, Kessler and Dowsett, (82) suggest that 3 points are important in understanding gender relationally.

• CUMULATIVE - Gender relations are consistuted clearly, over time and numerically, in a system of mutually reinforcing structures. Norms for family relations, workplace behaviour and promotion, for teenage and social life (and individual male/female partnerships) are all related. They mesh with each other to make an overall pattern, one of the most general and powerfully enduring structures in our society.

• POWER - This structure is one male priviledge and power and female disadvantage and subordination. This is true in virtually every social institution studied and it is important to recognise that it persists as an overall pattern despite being reversed in particular instances.

• CHANGE - This structure can and does change as a result of intellectual and political struggle. The recent history of change and tension in male-female relations underlines this.

Figure 7 (Steps to Success, Alma Thomas) looks at the psychological requirements of success.

These three models need to be considered together in order to conclude that:-

• Control over self (based on self awareness and purposefulness, not repression) is a primary requirement for tapping into potential.
• Control over self is precisely what females are more likely to “give away” in order to feel connection and rapport with others, which, in turn maintains their self-concept. (This is also seen as a social expectation.)
• Males are more likely to maintain a positive self-image by establishing hierarchy and independence, in other words, personal and social power is important to them. (Ditto re social expectation)
• In a male coach/female athlete relationship these engendered communication systems are likely to be in harmony socially, but in conflict in terms of the female’s athletic performance, which of course produces its own stresses. This may lead to misunderstandings in the whole relationship.

The scenario below puts these issues into a familiar setting.

“The female athlete’s unconscious emphasis on the bond with the coach encourages her to forgo power over her own athletic performance, and the male coach’s unconscious desire to establish and maintain his sense of status and independence within the relationship is the other half of their interlocking behavioural system. Over time the athlete becomes unable to believe in her own autonomy. She competes for the coach, (or significant other) rather than for herself; is unassertive because she is afraid of being seen as arrogant and aggressive; feels misunderstood and resentful sometimes, but guilty and responsible for other people’s feelings at others; she is stressed and out of control. She trains well but cannot produce it when it counts. In their anxiety to succeed she overtrains and becomes tired and injury prone. She feels she is physically talented but is afraid she does not have what it takes mentally. The coach agrees and says so. They are on a downward spiral likely to end in injury, drop-out or the breakup of the partnership.”

(G. Ward. Presentation to 21st Scottish International Coaches Convention. 1996. “Gender Blindness in Athletics and the Inhibition and Loss of Female Talent.”)

The personal motivation of coaches is another area which appears to be under-researched. (See chapter 4- Implications for coaches) But any analysis of the coach athlete relationship puts this, and his/her inter-personal and coaching style, firmly on the agenda.

In terms of the physiological, considering that the historical justification for restricting women’s participation in strenuous sport has been worries about effects on femininity and reproduction, it is perhaps surprising that so much about this whole area is under-researched.

No wonder, then, that menarche (commencement of the menstrual cycle in adolescence) and menstruation and their influence on sport participation and performance are not clearly understood. There is huge individual variation, frequently making what is known irrelevant to the individual athlete. However, the basics are outlined in the next chapter, together with descriptions of the “female triad” – eating difficulties, osteoporosis (bone thinning) and ammenorrhoea (irregular or no periods), which is a serious but preventable health hazard. But in most other areas there are not yet definitive coaching responses. In addition, academic research into relevant difference is prolific but piecemeal, leaving significant gaps. But one of British athletics coaching’s great strengths in the past has been its ability to innovate, both by trial and error and on the basis of academic rigour. It is an objective of this site and publication to stimulate just such advances by coaches able to make some imaginative leaps on behalf of girls and women in athletics.