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“You guys are really [redacted]’ing the bed today!”

Our coach then proceeded to snap his clipboard over his knee and hurl it against the wall of the tiny 5x5 closet our team stood in at halftime.

Was this the NBA playoffs? No. March Madness? Nope. Surely it couldn’t have been a meaningless grade 9 basketball tournament? Bingo.

Does that story sound insane and borderline abusive in that context? Perhaps.

But at the same time, I wouldn’t trade that experience for some ‘it’s not about winning, it’s about having fun!’ coach.

A friend from the team and I were recently reminiscing about that (now hilarious) season with our hot-headed coach. And he wasn’t the only hard-nosed coach we had growing up.

I feel like I played sports at the tail end of the era of the old-school tough-guy coach (pre-2010s). The kind who would rip your head off for mistakes or showing a lack of effort. The kind who would make you run fitness drills until someone puked.

Does that make us masochistic Stockholm-syndrome victims with no sense of self-worth?

No. If anything, those coaches taught us how to perform under pressure and prepared us for the real world. It had little to do with basketball or rugby. More than that, they were men in our lives who showed us they cared.

It all wasn’t anger and rage either. These coaches would share life stories, teach us value systems (make sure we leave the change room cleaner than we left it), the value of standing up for your teammates, etc.

A large part of this is missing in society today, putting young men in an impossible position. Without the role models, they are left to figure it out on their own, only to get told their doing it wrong and/or their generation is ‘ruined’.

It’s no secret that young men today feel more ostracized from society than ever. Unfortunately, the role models I had growing up have largely disappeared. One of the coaches at a rival high school, who was loved by literally thousands of former players, was nearly fired in my grade 12 year because a single player complained about his coaching style. The truth was that the player wasn’t getting enough playing time. Thankfully, the rest of the team stood up for the coach and it didn’t happen, but it marked the start of a shift. A shift where ‘tough love’ became synonymous with abuse and was no longer accepted.

But that’s not how the real world works. One of my first summer co-ops in university was in a customer service call centre, and it was tough. Years of playing sports with hard-nosed coaches had prepared me to handle an angry customer with ease. In my work as an M&A advisor, I deal with tense, emotional buyers and sellers every day, sometimes leading to what I call a ‘one-way conversation’ with clients (i.e. they yell at me and then hang up the phone). I don’t take it personally, since it’s all part of the ‘game’.

This is a long way of saying I fear we’ve spent much of the past two decades setting up kids for failure in the real world. Tough love is okay (obviously there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed) as long as it comes from a place of care.

Looking back, I'd take a clipboard-snapping coach who cared over a participation-trophy adult who didn't, every single time.

Credit: ideabrowser.com

3 rounds for time:

Rest 90 seconds between rounds. Score = total time.

Lower body strength + power day. 4 sets of:

Tips:

I actually love the work part of my daily grind but this made me lol

every second counts