Discipline is a responsibility of coaching
I would re-phrase that as, “Coaches have ongoing and partial responsibility for discipline…”
Unless the athlete is “ridiculously” young, the parents/guardians/care providers had better provide the vast amount of “discipline” before the coach every sees the athlete.
Multiple reasons for this, starting with you see them what, 3x per week for 90 minutes?
In the school setting it has to be a group effort, if one or two teaching contacts are “slack” the whole thing can fall apart because having less discipline is easier.
The mandatory not optional parents meeting will certainly prove the point, as do “mandatory” volunteer positions (I am talking of the must have volunteers needed to put on meets etc.).
The university I currently assist at is more proof, “mandatory” team meetings get missed by between 10% and 30% of athletes with some cross-over from meeting to meeting but I would guess about 10% are never there. Though there is lip service, there never has been any hard discipline that I am aware of and, it would be my opinion that part of the problem starts in track and field by many club/school programs having no such things as “cuts” in “making” the team, you show you are “in” and even the provisos of “must following coach’s plan” (as to number of training sessions etc. per week)can go out the window pretty quick.
“Mandatory”, the meaning of the word is not known, just as locally almost no one seems to know the meaning of “exclusive” as in our “exclusive” use time has had multiple groups using it from day 1.
If the head coach or other coaching staff have to ask for a reply after sending/giving out information 4x (a regular occurrence locally), is that not proof of the level of “discipline”?
