Snowflake or strategy: Rethinking coaches and athletes in modern sport

“Would you describe me as soft?” Even though the person was asking me through a screen from a few thousand miles away, I froze, then started shifting in my seat. That conversation, like my first with him, had already gone deep into topics of mental health and emotional openness. But Tom Short still has that aura — through the screen, over the distance — of someone you wouldn’t want to cross in a gym or outside a pub. Here’s a guy who worked for years under Sean Dyche at Burnley and Joey Barton at Bristol Rovers, seemingly channeling a bit of vintage Joe Pesci, asking me if I think he’s soft.

The irony is we set up the call because I wanted his perspective on an evergreen coaching trope: are athletes really softer than they once were? Have we been reduced to catering to the snowflake generation?

After I dissembled for a bit, Tom gave his self-assessment: “I’m not soft. I don’t define myself as soft. I’ve got a really soft side, but if anyone called me soft, I’d be furious. But on the other side of it, I actually quite like that people describe me as soft because that’s a really important part of coaching.”

A few days later, another practitioner told me how “soft” has become satisfying. Tim Dutton is a performance integration lead for the UK military, supporting soliders’ physical and athletic performance goals alongside preparing them for the demands of combat. “Some of the more senior soldiers will say ‘Your human performance program is making people soft.’ After they engage with what we’re doing and experience our approach themselves, they change their perspective. I absolutely love those turnarounds. It means they wish they had it when they were coming through; and what they first dismissed as soft, now they value those soft things.”

Short and Dutton might be too close to the problem, though. They’re both millennials. They might not realize how soft athletes have become because they’re snowflake-adjacent, if not worse.

Part of my desire to have these conversations was seeing coaches who have barely been around long enough to coach one generation of athletes falling back on the cliche that athletes today just aren’t made the way they used to be. No more iron, no more steel. Used to be you would tell them what to do, and they’d go out and do it. Light a fire under ’em, and heaven help them if they didn’t deliver or, worse, said anything back to you other than “How high?”

These are coaches who integrate new technologies and keep up with the latest developments in tactics and technical training. They don’t think of one mile runs and push-ups as adequate conditioning, and certainly know better than to use such things as punishments. But when it comes to communication, motivation, and psychology, they have a view of simpler times past that veers between nostalgia and resentment.

Does that say anything useful about the athletes, or does it reveal more about the coaches?

“Soft” athletes are adapted to their environment

The SAID principle is so fundamental to sport performance that most practitioners go years without consciously thinking about it, even as they apply it everyday in pursuit of aerobic, neuromuscular, tendinous, metabolic, or any other physiological improvement. An athlete’s physical capacities are the product of all the physical demands that he has adapted to over his life.

The SAID principles applies equally well to mental and psychological stressors. If athletes are “softer,” it’s because they have specifically adapted to reduced psychological and physical demands.

“Athletes today might be slightly naturally softer, but that’s neither the athlete nor the sport. That’s society. Children today get a much greater chance to succeed, and things are easier, from putting food on the table to getting to and from school,” Grant Downie said.

“When I was in school, we had to cycle, walk or run, so I usually rode my bike. After school I would go to a friend’s house and then go play football, which was another three miles away, and then go back. That’s 60-70 miles of cycling every week, on top of playing. Playing wasn’t structured, either. You take your jumper off, use it to mark out a goal, and start playing with children five years older. Maybe some adults come and play. Whether it was sunny, raining, or snowing, none of that really changed. That built up a level of fitness and durability, and some resilience that athletes today are a bit protected from developing.”

If the baseline, society-wide level of physical and psychological robustness has decreased, the standards for realizing one’s ambitions as professional athletes have stayed the same, and many of the pressures — the financial stakes and the effects of social media, to name two — have increased. Players may be getting softer because they are specifically adapting to the imposed demands of modern life. But practitioners are noticing and reacting to the widening delta between where athletes are and where they want to go.

Identifying and closing the gaps between a player’s current state and their ambitions — accounting for their personal history and the contexts in which they live — is pretty much the job of any sports practitioner. That points to the other major aspect of specifity in sports performance: individualization.

Again, we often think of this only in the physical sense, but it’s necessary in the psychological realm, too.

“Stress is relative,” Tim Dutton said. “More recent generations are coping with completely different stressors than older generations. In the past, there weren’t the pressures of social media, for example. That impacts younger people today in a way it didn’t individuals 20 or 30 years ago.”

Tom Short similarly sees generational differences in terms of trades and trade-offs. “I think we’re generationally a bit softer, and I think that has positives. ‘Back in the day, men were men and women were women,’ or however you want to look at it. But we were worse off for it in areas like mental health and how people dealt with such things.”

Dutton extends his perspective into the future:

“In 100 years, the world could completely change and it could be absolutely perfect by today’s standards. But we would find something to be stressed about just because we’re evolved to look for threats in the environment. Solve every problem, and you will find new problems.”

Those are the two lenses through which practitioners need to understand their athletes’ psychological needs: they are individuals, and they are humans. The former category is infinitely varied. The latter might not have changed much since a hairless chimp singed himself rubbing two sticks together.

Or at least not since Des Ryan started coaching at Arsenal.

“Players 20 years ago were very similar to the players now. There are the differences in what they wore, what they listened to, the phrases they used. But they have the same wants and needs, there’s similar humor and scenarios in the dressing room. Thinking about it, no major things are jumping out at me that you would all a dramatic change,” Ryan said.

“Everybody has a challenge in their life. One person may open up and talk about about their mental ill health or a death in the family and they need support. Every single person has something going on. My golden rule was to treat every person with that in mind, and to create a high challenge, high support message.”

Dave Scott-Thomas, though, thinks that no matter how high the support, it will never be enough for some athletes, and those are the ones fueling the “soft” stereotype.

“Most athletes were just as hard working, focused, driven, and fun loving as ever all the way through,” he says about his 30 years of coaching track & field at the collegiate and national team levels. “But those athletes are being masked and suppressed by coaches and a society catering to the lowest common denominator: athletes who are often seeking attention and status, rather than achieving their personal best.”

Two expectation gaps loom during my conversations with Dave. The first is common and timeless: an athlete with high ambitions, strong motivation, and a relentless work ethic thinks he knows what it takes, only to find out from his teammates, opponents, and coach that achieving those ambitions will require even more. The second is between what athletes say they want out of a coach and a high performance environment, and what they really want.

“Athletes think they want this stereotype of the ‘firm but fair’ coach. But they just want to feel like they have somebody that keeps them accountable, while not accepting any difficulty in doing whatever that thing is, whether that’s today’s workout or the ambition they put in front of you at the beginning of the season.”

Again, this applies to only a small number of athletes. For the most part, the older and younger coaches seem to agree that if today’s athletes are softer than previous generations, that’s neither a deficiency to be cured nor a ceiling on their potential. It’s just a problem to be solved. Since we’re the ones attempting to solve such problems, we need to ask: how have we changed, and how do we need to change?

Going “soft” could be coaches’ next survival skill

If survival depends on adaptation, surviving long enough to call it a career hinges on our ability to specifically adapt to the demands our athletes impose upon us.

Many coaches have a common evolution in their first few years. Some really do have it imposed upon them.

“I was too drill sergeant when I started,” Des Ryan said. “I was too into giving orders and shouting. Year two, I had an awakening of sorts, and a lot of that had to do with some of the senior players having a word with me. That created better skills around listening, planning, and changing hats as appropriate for the session and the athlete.

“When I was doing a high intensity session, I was a version of that person that would shout, encourage, roar, demand intensity. As soon as the session was over, that would come off and I would be that supportive person, that interested person who looked for feedback and was open to building with.

“But this was back in the 90s. I’ve evolved a lot more since then.”

Grant Downie speaks from a similar position.

“If you’re talking to me 25 years ago, we would be having a similar but quite different conversation. The wrinkles in our skin show what life has taught us along the way and we see those changes. But I would like to think the values haven’t changed. I’ve always been person centered, which means I care. But I can be ruthless, too, because I’ve learned that you have to be when you’re working. But you can be decent.”

Downie recalled the times when he had a young player and the player’s parents in his office at Manchester City, delivering the news that the academy was releasing the player.

“I’ve been in these meetings 35 years plus. And I still leave them, go home, and start crying because they’re difficult. I think you’ve got to not look for a shortcut to make them easy on yourself.”

Getting to that point where you can be ruthless, when necessary, while still acknowledging the emotions involved on all sides starts with the relationships that coaches build from day one.

Ever direct, Tom Short just says it.

“I literally tell people I care about them. ‘Look, mate, before we start this conversation, you need to know that I care about you and that I want you to succeed.’ I think it’s important that people hear that because maybe they don’t hear it very much, if at all.

“When we get new players, I sit down with them and try to understand them first, just asking a few questions about their families, their kids. I let them know that if they need help moving couches, my brothers and I have the van. If they need help with a restaurant, we know Bristol, so just give us a ring.

“That’s an olive branch straight away, so the player walks away thinking, ‘This bloke is all right. He’s trying to help us.'”

Another trendy topic in the technical and physical side of coaching these days is “implicit learning”: we create scenarios and contexts through which the players will learn what we want them to know, without the coach explaining the precise steps and desired outputs. Like SAID and individualization, this applies to athletes’ psychology as well as their bodies.

Dave recounts a time that he had to move a player down a level. The player’s response started with “This is bulls–t” and ended with “F–k you,” as he left Dave’s office. In between, Dave explained to this athlete that there are only so many spots on the bus and on the top team, and that he could only give this athlete so many opportunities before he had to either deliver on a performance or spend some time on the lower circuit.

The athlete had a strong performance that weekend, and afterwards told Dave: “I got on the bus and I thought, ‘F–k you’. Then I thought, ‘Oh, wait, you’re going to be as happy as me about this.'”

It took the sequence of demotion, fury, performance, and spite for the athlete to realize that there was never any daylight between his goals for himself and Dave’s goals for him.

It took even more years before they could discuss the full dynamic. Dave later said to him, “I needed to do it, but it was a bit more difficult because I liked you and we had a good relationship.” The athlete responded, “I know. That’s a big part of what pissed me off. I thought you’d give me more breaks because we were on good terms.” The athlete acknowledged that he tried to take advantage of the relationship. In a different context, or for a different coach, this could come across as soft or downright manipulative.

Implicit, delayed fuse interactions like Dave’s or straight-forward positive interactions like Short’s build the social capital that separates coaches from technicians. The sports performance space has people who can analyze testing results, film, or daily monitoring data and develop a sophisticated profile of the athlete and then program a set and rep scheme that will optimize every key variable of that athlete’s performance.

Short notes that few of them are actually in the arena, or have the record of success to match their practitioner prowess. “What’s stopping them from grabbing a job and really running with it? It’s relationship building capacity. Without that, players just won’t trust you and won’t like you.”

Such practitioners are already facing obsolence: not from soft coaches like Short, but from AI.

Nearly a decade ago, Dave offered disgruntled athletes an alternative coaching set-up: CoachBot.

“You put CoachBot on your phone, put in your age, your training parameters, your performance profile and recent workouts, and CoachBot will spit out really good workouts for you. When you’re stressed or just want to talk, it will respond to you with the full range of emotions in real time.”

No one wanted it.

Dave presented another option. “We have a drone with a camera and a speaker hovering over your outdoor training sessions, and cameras and speakers at each station in the gym. I can sit in my office, taking in better views and more information — and I won’t have to be out there stressing you out. What do you say?

“I’ve given that spiel probably to over 100 people. 100% have said, no, I wouldn’t want that. I want you out there with me.”

Dave’s hypotheticals — both of which are now fully realizable — cleverly parse the macro attributes of a coach. CoachBot has superhuman technical abilities and sufficient emotional response abilities, but no physical, individual person. The drone option trades a bit of technical accuracy to put a person back in the loop, but still without true human-to-human contact.

Neither arrangement was satisfactory. The athletes wanted a physically and emotionally present coach, even at the expense of technical proficiency or a bit of stress.

“We value real emotion, touch, authenticity. Even if I’m being a bit of a dick to you as a coach, over time the majority of athletes will sense what’s really you. Then they can excuse it, or at least understand it, long enough for us to get our heads on straight and say ‘Hey, I was a little short with you on Saturday. Can we talk about it? I’m not making excuses, I was up until four in the morning,’ and it goes from there.”

Being a bit soft might just be the best future-proofing we have. As Rett Larson told Sportsmith recently:

“You will see students of gamification, psychology, and group control taking jobs from coaches who read SuperTraining in Russian and own all of Paul Chek’s DVDs…

“These coaches will spend less time studying different theories of periodization and more time learning how to make athletes care about power cleans after four years of doing them every Wednesday. Understanding the power of loss avoidance, curiosity, scarcity, ownership, unpredictability, accomplishment, and social influence will become some of the most important tools in a coach’s tool belt. These skills are anything but soft.”

Are they the snowflakes, or are we?

Instead of asking “Have athletes gotten soft?” a better framing is “Are athletes today different than they were 20, 40, 60 years ago?” “Yes.” “How so?”  “For one, they are softer.”

This captures the facts that each generation of athletes presents a different set of challenges and opportunities to coaches, and those differences stem from the context in which they exist. Earlier generations of athletes may have been “tougher.” But their coaches knew much less about how psychological and mental factors enhance performance, and therefore they were not able to leverage more advanced tools of motivation, communication, group dynamics, and neuroscience in pursuit of sport performance. It’s no different than how coaches of that era knew the basics of rate of force development, but didn’t have the force plates nor the depth of research to incorporate eccentric peak velocity into their programming.

Over the last decade, athletes and coaches alike have raised their level of knowledge. The athletes may have covered more ground than practitioners, relative to their starting point, because so much high quality information is now accessible for anyone who is interested, instead of being confined to our textbooks, journals, and conferences.

“We see a big difference with the young people that are coming in now. Compared to just four years ago, everyone is listening to The Huberman Lab podcast, and they’re arriving with resources that has them more aware and more conscientious about looking after themselves,” Tim Dutton said.

This has raised athletes’ interest in things like sleep, nutrition, and mental health, along with increasing their awareness of things that do require an expert’s guidance, like training modalities, performance tech, and supplementation. That creates a fertile ground for building buy in amongst our athletes: when we introduce something new, they might already have heard of the what or the why.

Des Ryan has observed a similar shift amongst the athletes’ parents.

“If I go back a couple of decades, they didn’t know what sport science or strength & conditioning were. Parents were hugely appreciative that their son or daughter was being supported and getting trained. They would ask how they could help, and it would be nothing but thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Dutton and Ryan both recognize the challenge and opportunity that this presents. For Dutton, athletes asking more specific and pointed questions — sometimes in response to our programs or instructions — is a positive stimulus to level up.

“You feel feel like you have to be all over every podcast that’s come out in the last five years when it comes to strength science or human performance science,” Dutton says. “You don’t have to be. You just say, ‘OK, I’ll go and have a look at that and get back to you.'”

Ryan has seen parents become more demanding, setting the stage for challenging conversations and questions. He uses this to his — and his players’ and his club’s — advantage.

“What emerges is a parent engagement strategy, the realization that parents can be your greatest ally if everything is managed properly.

“People are going to ask questions. People are going to talk about other programs, other coaches, other systems. My strategy was getting there first. Clear induction, clear expectations, clear reviews. I spent a lot of time creating graphs of our approach, which describe exactly what we’re going to do and why. That’s in the induction and continues at nearly every contact point, so I can always use it as a reference. Then when a parent says ‘There’s a lot of movement skills. They should do more endurance,’ I can give them an answer that they’ve heard before. Be mannerly and objective, so it doesn’t upset anyone.”

Not every coach shares Dutton’s and Ryan’s glass-half-full approach to the more informed, inquisitive, and empowered athlete or parent. Such coaches view those encounters not as a challenge in the sense of an opportunity to improve and overcome, but as a threat: a challenge to their authority or position. When questioned, they hear an athlete or parent questioning them in a personal-professional sense rather than inquiring about the rationale for or validity of some fact or opinion.

These are the coaches who lump “soft” in with disrespectful, lazy, and other tropes. These coaches are soft, and not in the way that gives Short and Dutton so much pride.

Dave urges them to look in the mirror. Whether they are younger or older, he puts them in the category of coaches who “coach for the ‘fun’ part of it” — whether that’s the camaraderie and banter, or wins and trophy lifts — “as opposed to the heavy lifting of dealing with the psyche.”

“Such coaches view those encounters not as a challenge in the sense of an opportunity to improve and overcome, but as a threat: a challenge to their authority or position. These are the coaches who lump “soft” in with disrespectful, lazy, and other tropes. These coaches are soft, and not in the way that gives Short and Dutton so much pride.”

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Soft launch: We still have to develop athletes

Regardless of a player’s starting point, they will have to harden up in pursuit of their goals and to ensure they finish in a good place.

Grant Downie may remember earlier generations fondly, but he doesn’t pine for the good ol’ days, nor think we need to go back to that era.

“That’s the last thing I’m saying. There was a natural robustness and resilience, and we need to still build that through the activities that we do. Society wants to protect children. That’s an excellent desire.

“But we also have to expose talent to trauma, and that trauma must be adversity.”

That could be as simple as having a young player “play up” a few year groups. Downie was recently watching his former club Manchester City take on Wolves in the Premier League.

“One of the young players from Manchester City who started in that game and had been playing regularly recently, I can remember taking him to an under 12 tournament. He was tiny, absolutely tiny, and we were playing against an opponent with the biggest centre forward I’ve ever seen in that age group! He probably looked about 16, so it was like David and Goliath. But David stood up to Goliath and you could tell that it was good for him, whereas for Goliath it was no value.”

Des Ryan thinks that sport institutions need to structure their organization in a way that maximizes the human relationships that underlie high performance.

“Arsene Wenger articulated this very well to me when I was at Arsenal’s academy. He said he loves ‘the village,’ where there’s a small number of people, everyone knows each other, and there is a great community spirit. Inevitably, you need more than a village. In ‘the town,’ you know each section of the town and a lot of the people there. There’s still a strong community spirit, and it works just as well as the village even though it’s bigger.

“But then you get to the city. There are dark and dingy parts, and some parts don’t talk to the other part.

“The town is the sweet spot. We assigned 10 players to each member of the academy’s sport performance staff. They would own everything for those athletes: gym sessions, pitch sessions, rehab. We let the players and staff members have a say in who they worked with, as well as factoring in personality profiles and my intuition on who would work well together.”

Tim Dutton is trying to undo the damage he attributes to the person responsible for the breach at the core of this soft vs. hard debate: Rene Descartes.

“Descartes separated the mind from the body, and since then it’s been mental health set against physical performance, psychologist vs. biologist.

“We encourage practitioners to expand their knowledge and contributions beyond their discipline, and to guide that, we have a human performance program technical model. We’re working on soldiers’ health and reducing injury risk. We know that we can optimize cellular health from a physical perspective, but we can also optimize it from a psychological perspective, for example, by reducing cognitive stress. The psychological aspects directly improve the physical outcomes.”

Leading from the front: Going soft

“Would you describe yourself as a caring coach? Do you think your players know that you care about them?”

Tom Short put me on the spot one more time with those two questions. More dissembling and more babbling, and then he gave me something to work towards.

“There’s an inverse relationship: the softer a coach is, the harder players become. The more a coach cares and the more a coach really has your back, brings the dog in, helps you wash your car or whatever it is — however extreme you go… Does that get that player to run harder for you? I think it does. You can take the piss, storm about, and drop knowledge, but does it actually make them run harder? No.”

I shared with Short a description of Major Richard Winters in Band of Brothers:

“[He] got the men to perform because he expected nothing but the best, and ‘you liked him so much you just hated to let him down.'”

That covers the gamut from caring to courage to competence, and it hit home with Short. “For me, mate, that would be one of the nicest compliments anyone could pay me.”

And most of us would feel much more comfortable saying that about a colleague than spreading the word that he’s soft. Instead of lamenting that our athletes have gone soft, maybe we should reflect on why we’re not receiving such meaningful praise.