Originally submitted by: The Itinerant Ethicist

When we think of people who break bad news, it is easy to come up with the professional bad news givers: doctors telling patients they have a terminal illness; and journalists reporting on environmental perils, epidemics and natural disasters. Yet, we know doctors and journalists are just two groups among the many professionals who must routinely think about the ethics of giving out bad-tasting medicine to their patients or reporting dangerous facts to their publics. Less obvious to many is the routine bad news daily handed out in the athletics community. If we think about it for a moment, however, bad news is always breaking out in the sport world. If I mention several examples everyone will recognize them: the coach telling a veteran starter he has to ride the bench; a trainer informing an athlete she can't play in the championship game because of injury; the academic adviser letting a college scholarship player know she is no longer eligible to play because of low grades; a coach learning from the media his star prospect is going to another school; fans finding out from the team website their favorite player has signed with another team; or fans hearing their team owner is planning to move the team to another city. At the same time, many players in the athletic community are not often sympathetic characters. Pro and big time college athletes, for example, are seen by many as coddled. Because some pro athletes, especially in high- profile sports, make lots of money, many people do not care about the ethical consequences of the manner in which bad news is meted out to them. Besides, athletes are trained or define themselves as being able to "suck it up" or "tough it out"--even when they get bad news--from their coaches, trainers and their fans. Likewise, athletes learn early about the facts of losing, a form of bad news that is supposed to be--just part of the game. Fair enough. But sport is not just for the pros. It also feeds off and has a habit of turning away the young. There are many times when bearing up stoically is not always fair, and the coach's or parent's advice to "suck it up" is not the most ethical way to go about giving bad news to an athlete. Perhaps the most common example of breaking bad news to the young in sport is when a coach informs an athlete that he does not make the cut and she does not get to play on the team. Traditionally, we can visualize this: the news is circulated through the selected team list on the coach's office door. We can see the kids' reactions: those who are on it pumping their hands in the air and whooping about their good news, and those kids whose names are not on the list turning away in anger, disappointment or shock on learning their bad news. Coaches and traditionalists in the sport community like to think they are truth-tellers--that breaking bad news is just a form of teaching kids to face up to the fact tht they are not good enough to play on the best team. I don't have a problem with coaches telling kids the truth about their skills for and prospects in a particular sport. I think it is the responsibility of a youth coach, however, to remember that the way the truth is told in these circumstances is equally important. In fact, I think it is a matter of sustaining and growing sport today. There are many kids these days who are "told the truth" and turned away too early, and thus are permanently turned off from all sports. Youth and high school coaches need to acknowledge that one of their primary roles is to keep kids playing sports, not just their sport or their game, but playing other sports and other games. The goal is not protect young athletes from bad news, but to make sure bad news does not also stop them from playing other sports which they might have a talent for or which they can enjoy. It is one thing to be a truth-teller as coaches say they want to be. It is quite another thing to be a dream-stopper. So, here are two suggestions. They are pretty simple to do. First, youth coaches, including parent coaches, need to spend some time thinking about the how (are lists on my office door or ignoring a rejected athlete best practices?) and not just the why (she doesn't have the skills right now) of telling a young athlete he cannot be or she is no longer a member of the team. Second, youth coaches have to think about the athlete on the receiving end, that is, they need to think about "the getting" of bad news as much as the way bad news is relayed to young athletes. In his research and writing on bad news, sociologist Douglas W. Maynard suggests that getting bad news is sometimes like experiencing "a rupture" or a breakdown in the way a person has defined himself or herself in the world up to that point. For young athletes, getting bad news can sometimes call into question how they have dreamed of themselves and their futures. The responsibility of the coach in these circumstances is to take down the list from the door, invite these athletes in and talk with them about ways to reinvent and dream new worlds for themselves in new games and in new sports.