What happens when coach dares to put discipline before winning?

By David McElroy · January 27, 2012

What does a coach do when his players talk back to him, ignore his game instructions and can’t be on time for practice? Most coaches today would grumble, but accept it as part of dealing with modern youth. Coach Mike Allen suspended his starting five players instead.

Allen took over coaching the boys’ basketball team at Gunderson High School in San Jose last year. He believes in discipline and respect, but he didn’t find much of those qualities among the players on his team. Instead, he found lousy attitudes and a lack of commitment.

He gave the players on the team “two, three, four chances” to correct their shortcomings, but nothing changed. Allen said the players continued to talk back to him, ignore his instructions during games and “showboat” on the court. So he suspended the starters. Shortly afterwards, the rest of the team confronted him, demanding that he reinstate the suspended players. When he refused, all 13 members of the team quit.

“I refused to win at all costs,” Allen told the San Jose Mercury News. “I knew I needed to take a stand or it wasn’t going to be a worthwhile season.”

After he lost his entire team, he called up players from the junior varsity team. He’s now playing a varsity schedule with just six underaged and unprepared players. The team has a 3-16 record — and all three of the wins came from before the suspensions. In many games, the young players are being blown out. They finished one game with just four players, after two of them fouled out.

The school administration has supported Allen, but some parents and students clearly don’t understand what the issues are. What’s worse, it’s clear that the former players don’t understand what they did wrong. One of the former players complained to the Mercury News that the coach wanted to run the team his way.

“We weren’t being that disrespectful,” said former player Eddie Perez. “He wants to run the team his way and doesn’t listen to our own opinions.”

So he knows the players were being disrespectful, but it wasn’t that disrespectful, huh? How much disrespect is allowed before a coach or adult in a leadership role has to teach kids that respect is required? For his part, Allen believes that attitude is symptomatic of a larger problem today.

“These kids nowadays feel they are privileged and have a right,” Allen said, “but they fail to realize what being part of a team is about.”

The attitudes the players exhibit seem to be what happens when you send kids through a school system that teaches them more about their own worth than about respect and being held accountable. It seems as though our society has been moving for decades toward teaching kids that everybody wins, everybody gets his way and that there are no consequences to bad actions.

We need more men and women like Allen, not just as coaches, but as parents, teachers and leaders of all sorts. We need adults who love the kids as much as Allen clearly does, but who are dedicated to doing what’s best for them in the long run, not just making them happy for the moment. That requires learning to face mistakes and deal with consequences.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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