The coach as a parent: when the relationship is more than professional

“I spent more time with him than with my own father. He knew when I was ill before I knew it myself.”

This is how athletes who started training as children sometimes talk about their coach. There is gratitude in those words, and often love. But sometimes there is something else too: confusion, because the same person who taught you everything can also be the one you still shrink from when they call. Or the one without whom you cannot imagine making any decision on your own.

In this post I write about a relationship with a coach that becomes more than professional — about attachment, power and dependence, and also about what a healthy relationship looks like. I am writing as a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, not as a sport psychologist. So I am less interested in how the relationship with your coach affects your results, and more in what happens to you as a person within it.

Part of this post is about the abuse of power. If this is a painful subject for you, read slowly and stop whenever it feels like too much. At the end there are numbers you can call.

Why a coach becomes more than a coach

If you think about how much time an athlete spends with their coach, it is almost impossible for the relationship to stay purely professional. Many start training at six or seven. The coach is with them several hours a day, at training camps, at competitions, at their first wins and first defeats. The coach sees them cry, sees them proud, sees their body through every stage of growing up.

During this time the child, and later the teenager, forms an attachment. Attachment is not something that happens only between a child and a parent — in youth and adulthood it can form with anyone who is with us for a long time, responds to us and has some power over us. A coach often meets all three conditions. So it is not unusual for an athlete to experience their coach as a second father or a second mother.

Researchers studying the coach–athlete relationship have looked at whether athletes attach to their coaches in a similar way to how they attach to their parents. They found that they do — and that this attachment, too, can be more or less secure. Athletes who experienced their coach as reliable and available reported a better relationship with them and also greater well-being. Those who were more anxious in the relationship were more often dissatisfied and less at ease.

A coach can therefore be a secure base — someone from whom you dare to go out into the world and to whom you can return when things go badly. It is one of the most beautiful roles an adult can play in a young person’s life. But the same closeness that makes safety possible also creates vulnerability.

What we know about the abuse of power in sport

I would rather not begin with fear, but I cannot leave this part out. In a large study in the Netherlands and Belgium, adults were asked about their experiences in organised sport before the age of eighteen. About 38% reported at least one experience of psychological violence, and a smaller but by no means negligible share also reported physical and sexual violence. The violence did not come only from coaches — it also came from teammates and other adults — but coaches were a significant part of the picture.

In 2016 the International Olympic Committee published a consensus statement on harassment and abuse in sport. It stated that abuse can happen in every sport and at every level, that children and young people are particularly vulnerable, and that the common denominator is an imbalance of power.

That figure does not mean every coach is dangerous. Most coaches work with dedication and integrity. It does mean that a relationship in which one person decides your place on the team, your body and your future is a relationship that needs clear boundaries — and adults who protect them.

What a healthy relationship looks like

The British researcher Sophia Jowett, who has long studied the relationship between coach and athlete, proposed a model she calls the “3+1Cs”. It describes four ingredients of a good relationship:

• Closeness — mutual trust, respect and the sense that the other person cares about you.
• Commitment — both want the relationship to last and to succeed.
• Complementarity — the roles fit together: the coach leads, the athlete follows, but both contribute and respond to each other.
• Co-orientation — how well you understand each other, whether you know what the other is thinking and feeling.

The model is useful because it shows that a good relationship is not just a friendly one. It is a relationship in which both know where they stand, what they expect and who plays which role. Closeness without clear roles quickly blurs. Roles without closeness are cold.

When the line blurs: power and dependence

What happens when closeness grows into dependence? It does not happen overnight. It often starts with something that looks good: the coach believes in you when nobody else does. The coach calls in the evening to check how you are. The coach knows your worries better than your parents do.

Gradually, though, the coach may become the only person entitled to an opinion about your life. They decide when you sleep, what you eat, who you spend time with, whether you may have a partner, whether you may go to the seaside with friends. Their praise means everything to you; their silence plunges you into despair. Your parents step back, because “the coach knows best”.

The researchers Ashley Stirling and Gretchen Kerr have described what emotional abuse in sport looks like. It is not necessarily loud. It can involve shouting and humiliation in front of the team, but also quieter forms: deliberate ignoring, withholding attention and support as punishment, threats of being dropped, comments about the body. The key is that it is a repeated pattern, carried out by someone you depend on.

Especially dangerous is manipulation that presents itself as care: “Only I understand you.” “Your parents wouldn’t allow this, but I trust you.” “This stays between us.” When an adult builds a secret with a young person that nobody else may know, it is always a warning sign — however warm the relationship.

A short conversation

This is how part of a conversation might sound with a young athlete who has recently changed clubs (the conversation is composite and does not describe a real person):

“The new coach is fine. It’s just … he doesn’t say anything. After training he goes home.”
“What did the previous one do?”
“He always told me what he thought. About everything. About training, about school, about my girlfriend.”
“How did you feel when he told you what he thought about your girlfriend?”
“Bad. But I told myself he knew what was good for me.”
“Maybe it feels now as if the new coach isn’t interested in you. But it could also be that for the first time someone is letting you live your own life.”

This is a common scene. Someone who has spent a long time in a relationship where the coach reached into everything may at first experience healthy distance as rejection. Closeness that was too much has become the yardstick for what it means that someone cares.

Why it is so hard to speak up

People often ask me: why does an athlete who goes through something like this not say anything? There are several answers, and all of them are understandable.

• Loyalty. The coach has given you a lot. Speaking badly of them feels like betrayal.
• Career. Whether you are selected depends on them. If you speak up, you could lose everything you have trained for over years.
• Normality. If it has been like this from the start, it is hard to know it could be any different. “That’s just how sport is.”
• Shame. Athletes are often ashamed that they let it happen — even though the responsibility was never theirs. I wrote about the difference between shame and guilt in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters.
• The adults around. Parents who trust the coach more than their child, or a club that would rather not see.

I would add something I notice in my work with families: the relationship with a coach is often intertwined with relationships at home. If a father was distant, a coach can fill the space he left. If parents were overly anxious, the coach’s decisiveness can be a relief. And the other way round: what you learn in the relationship with your coach, you carry on — into your partnership and into the workplace. The voices we hear inside were once outside, as I wrote in Your inner voices were once outer ones.

The role of parents is especially important here. A child needs at least one adult who is not part of the sporting system and with whom they are safe regardless of results. More on this in Young athletes and parents: the pressure we don’t see.

Exercise: a map of your relationship with your coach

This exercise is for you if you are an athlete — current or former — and want to understand your relationship with your coach better. You will need paper, a pen and about half an hour of quiet.

1. Draw a circle for yourself and one for your coach. Place them as close or as far apart as feels true — not as it should be. Do they overlap? By how much?
2. Draw the other people who matter to you around yourself: parents, partner, friends outside sport. How far are they from you compared with your coach?
3. Next to each area of your life, write down who makes the decisions: training, food, sleep, free time, relationships, school or work. Where is your say? Where is your coach’s?
4. Write down one thing you would not dare tell your coach. What do you think would happen if you did? That answer tells you a great deal about how much safety there is in the relationship.
5. Show the map to someone outside sport whom you trust. Ask them what they see. Sometimes another person immediately notices what we cannot see from the inside.

If strong unease, fear or shame comes up during the exercise, that is important information. It does not mean something is wrong with you. It means that something may have happened in this relationship that deserves to be talked about with someone you trust — or with a professional.

When a close relationship is not a problem

I want to be clear: this post does not say that every close relationship with a coach is unhealthy. Many athletes remember their coaches as people who saved their lives — literally or figuratively. A coach can be the first adult who saw worth in someone. That is precious, and I would not want to diminish it.

Nor is every strict coach abusive. High demands, clear boundaries and direct criticism of performance are part of sport. The difference lies in whether the criticism is aimed at what you do or at who you are; whether the coach leaves room for your own life; and whether you feel safe with them even when things are not going well.

And one more thing: if your main concern is how to work better with your coach for the sake of results — communication in training, agreeing goals, pressure before competitions — the right person to see is a sport psychologist. If criminal acts are involved, the right place to go is the police. If you are in serious distress, depressed or having thoughts that you would rather not live, turn first to a doctor or a psychiatrist. Psychotherapy is appropriate when you want to understand and work through what happened in the relationship and how it affects your life today. I wrote more about when each professional is the right one in Psychotherapy for athletes.

Where you can turn

If you have experienced or are experiencing violence — psychological, physical or sexual — you are not alone and it is not your fault. You can call:

• SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence: 080 11 55 (free of charge, in Slovenia)
• TOM helpline for children and young people: 116 111 (in Slovenia)
• Police: 113 (in Slovenia) — including to report violence that happened in the past
• Mental health crisis line Klic v duševni stiski: 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am, in Slovenia)
• Samaritans helpline Zaupni telefon Samarijan: 116 123 (24 hours a day, in Slovenia)
• Emergency: 112 (in Slovenia)

If you are a parent and worried about what is going on between your child and their coach, it is important to listen to your child, not interrogate them. Tell them you believe them and that the adults around them will do something. Many clubs and sports federations have a person you can turn to, and that is a good first step. If you suspect a criminal offence, however, the right route is the police or the social work centre.

How psychotherapy can help

In relational family therapy, the approach I am training in, we always look at relationships in context — how the relationship with the coach was intertwined with relationships in the family, what you learned about yourself in it and how you carry that forward.

In therapy we can explore what your coach meant to you, and what they took from you. You can grieve for a relationship that has ended, or for one you never had. You can learn about setting boundaries — not only with a coach, but also with others who have power over you. And you can look at how your attachment pattern shows up in your relationships today; more on this in Attachment styles.

Where there has been abuse, it is important that therapy starts with stabilisation and safety, not with disclosing details. You set the pace. As a trainee I work under supervision, which means my work is regularly reviewed with more experienced professionals — and with such sensitive subjects, that is an additional safeguard for you. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

Incidentally, similar thinking about boundaries and power applies to the relationship between therapist and client. If you would like to know where the limits lie there, read What a therapist must not do.

What to remember

• A relationship with a coach is often an attachment relationship as well — and there is nothing unusual about that. A coach can be a secure base.
• A healthy relationship has closeness, commitment, clear roles and mutual understanding. Closeness without boundaries quickly blurs.
• Abuse of power in sport is not rare. Warning signs include controlling everything, humiliation, isolation from loved ones and secrets.
• If you have experienced violence, it is not your fault. In Slovenia, call the SOS helpline 080 11 55, TOM 116 111 or the police on 113.
• For results, see a sport psychologist; for serious distress, a doctor or psychiatrist; to understand and work through the relationship, psychotherapy.