Part 3 | Coaching the Big Picture
I recently spoke with Professor Scott Brooks, Director of Research at Arizona State University’s Global Sport Institute, about his childhood, his athletics coaching, research interests, and more. Check out part 3 (of 5) of my interview with Dr. Brooks.
(The following interview has been edited for length and clarity)
Another part of being a civic leader as a coach is being a voice that people turn to, both behind closed doors and in public. During times of crisis, or in times of social reckoning, people often care what coaches have to say. How do you go about having those conversations?
Part of what I learned through getting to know kids, you’ve got to have those times where you pull them all together collectively to talk, and that's got to happen every practice. Coaches often do it at the beginning and the end but they're not generally talking about life, they're talking about what their basketball agenda is. I want to talk about life and I learned that with Claude Gross. We talked to them at their level to get into teaching moments. Take, for example, a kid has spent $150 on an NBA player’s jersey, and we know their family does not come from a lot of wealth, and we find out the kid spent the money that he was supposed to go and buy his winter coat with, on the jersey.
I take the conversation a little deeper, to why it costs so much, and what the logo is, and about collective bargaining agreements. We literally had that conversation with 6th, 7th, and 8th graders and were educating them, "Here's how the market works. Here's how the business works behind the logos." And so for me, those are the natural conversations to have in the beginning, and then you get to – we had the conversation about Kaepernick when I was coaching high school ball in San Diego. And it was, "Okay, what's going on in the world? What are you all thinking?" I just opened up that conversation, as an assistant coach. The head coach didn't want to spend too much time on it because that's not the way he thought. He wasn't in line with it and he was just like, "Hey, we're here for ball." So I just talked to the players individually during stretching and all of the pre-practice stuff. And I'm talking to guys about what they're thinking.
I love being an assistant coach because I always do it as a sociologist, as a Harry Edwards. I learned underneath Claude, the way to support a head coach is by talking and getting to know all the players. I get the ins and outs, like who got broken up with and all of that. And you've had those kinds of conversations. So with Kaepernick, I knew the kids that were thinking about it. I only had two Black Americans on the team and one of them, my son, was very aware of it and was interested in it and wanted to talk. But most of them didn’t want to talk about it. I would handle it by speaking with the kids individually, getting a sense for where they were and answering any questions.
One time, as I gave another kid a ride to a game he wanted to know, "Coach, how do you feel about marijuana?" So we talked about CBD versus THC, what was legal and what was illegal. I had those conversations one on one. If I'm the head coach, I bring those to the team because this is about society and I'm there to teach, so they're going to hear my perspective.
I also had to deal with the N-word on that team. And so I brought that up to the group early. My son had already been on the team for a year and had told me that that was being said. So I addressed it right away with the coach and then I addressed it with the team and just shut it down, like "We're not going to use that word. I don't care if you're of African descent, if you're Black or not.” Again, there was only one Black American and another one was Somali, so it wasn't like the team was Black. And I said, "We can talk more about it," and they really didn't want to talk about it. One kid who was biracial would use it and another kid was, as we say, "Down," who was a kid of color and he was used to saying it. I would talk to them about it, remind them about it. We'd have conversations, but they don't all want to talk about everything.
That's one of the other things. You could get on a soap box and talk to them and they're not listening at all. I find that one-on-ones are more useful – if you don't have the leader of the team wanting to talk about it, or one of the leaders wanting to talk about it, then I do it one on one and I can approach everyone that way. So, I had explained myself in the team setting, read the room and realized they didn't really want to talk about it, then I went one on one. I don't just leave it as something not to talk about. If it were something like what happened with Breonna Taylor, I would be speaking about it publicly, in front of the whole team. And then you talk to one kid about it, “What are you thinking?" And I just had those kinds of frank conversations.
I think that if I were in an all-White setting, it would be a little bit different. That is really where these conversations need to happen. And I think that a lot of coaches feel like they don't have to talk about it if they don't have players of color, and in reality, it's exactly the opposite. If you're in a place like when I lived in the middle of the country in central Missouri, and you got an all-White team, now you really need to have these kinds of conversations because these are the kids that grew up without a whole lot of interaction outside of their race, without a whole lot of people who can understand it and explain it to them in a way that's different.
I also coached my daughter's soccer team, and you'd be amazed that I probably had more of these societal questions with little kids who were under the age of 10, because they hear on the news or see or hear what their parents are doing. And that's what they talked to you about. They would be the ones who say something because of what happened, because a Breonna Taylor or Tony McDade was shot, and other kids might not exactly know and they start asking questions. You're going to have more conversations with younger kids than you are with high school kids, I would imagine, just because they eavesdrop as they're sitting in the car with their parents and they’re talking about these issues. They're not independent yet, so they're just listening to what's going on. When you're in high school, unless you want to plug into that, you can just be into your own thing. You don't have to pay attention to that stuff. But when you're a little kid, you're just sitting there soaking up what's being said and talked about around you.
There was a girl on my daughter’s soccer team who was biracial. And her dad was White and this is in central Missouri. Barack Obama was running for his second term and she asked me while we're waiting for her White grandmother to pick her up, "Coach, how do you feel about Obama? Because my daddy says that he just wants to give money to people who are poor even though they're not paying taxes… And I found it odd because we're on food stamps."
She was nine or 10 years old. And I'm like, “That is odd. It doesn't make sense to you." She's like, "No." I said, "Yeah, well, it doesn't make sense." So we are having this kind of a conversation. And I had other kinds of conversations about things that went on when Michael Brown was shot. It's little kids who will say something about it. I think we thought maybe all this happens to high school kids, but high schoolers are in their own room and kind of independent. They learn to be more concerned about what their friends are going to think. So they don't always want to talk. The younger kids are unfiltered. They're not afraid. They're just going to talk. They're going to ask questions, and those are really critical moments. Speaking with her, I then thought, okay, I can say how I'm feeling, but I don't want to put her in danger. I don't need to activate her and fill her with ideas in her head where her family then is thinking bad about her, because she's going to grow into a Black woman. I'm more or less like, "Let's keep talking. You tell me, what're you thinking?"
I could tell her, "Oh, well I think that every President has their ups and downs, but I'm very happy to have Obama as President." So I'm very forthright in that, but I don't need to get into things that maybe she's not ready for and that are going to create more problems for her. I wanted her to come back. If all of a sudden they got Malcolm X as her coach, she's not going to be back. I want to keep having these conversations. I want to help her to think through things for her future, while she's trying to figure out this identity. I want her to be able to share with me. So I was very much taking on that kind of a counseling role and thinking about the long term and how old this kid is developmentally. And trying to figure that stuff out.