Sports Ethics: “Step Up”

“We were down. Coach told me I had to step up my game and I did.”

How many times have we heard this expression from coaches and players: step up.

I think the notion of step up carries real weight as an ethical and psychological moment in sport and represents a model to carry into professional domains.

Think about the metaphor for a moment: step up. It places the person on a step, a place, even a plateau. The notion specifies that the athlete or professional exists at a particular level of performance on an upward climb. The level may be a plateau or it may be a lower rung, does not matter. What does matter: the metaphor urgently states that the present step/level/plateau does not suffice to achieve the goal. Staying at this level, this step, means failure.

Let’s think about some classic situations where a player or coach must step up their play. I am going to use team here but this applies as much to individuals in individual sports as team competition.

• ·      Seniors or veterans have graduated, and the younger players of the team have to step up and perform at a higher level of skill and commitment.
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• ·      The team has fallen behind in a contest, and the contest verges on getting away from the team. The player must step up and perform to bring the team back from its lethargy and gain energy and focus.
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• ·      The team possesses a lead but the other team makes their expected run. The momentum seems to be shifting, and a player has to step up and stop the run.
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• ·      Players can step up when a window exists to excel to break the game open like avoiding a tackle and finding a fourth gear or making a free throw shot with time running out.
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• ·      Players are challenged to step up when a championship or playoff or chance is on the line.

All these situations differ but carry a common denominator—the existing level of performance will not work and must change. To the point of the game, the performance must rise up from its immediate level.

Step up has two related connotations. First, it might mean that a team is playing below its normal level. The below norm can occur when a team has not prepared for the challenge opponents pose. They took an opponent for granted and must literally snap out of lethargy and step up to their normal level of play. A team might be surprised or tired and is not containing the other team’s comeback. Athletes must change their emotional and mental mind set on the spot and take the game seriously. They need to respond with integrity to the challenge before them.

Second, step up suggests that just being competent or playing at the norm, even if very high, will not work. A team might be playing hard and well, but just not good enough to win. A team may have been playing very well, but the opponent is roaring back, making a run, or they opponents take the lead. This calls for exceptional performance. Exceptional does not demand the impossible but dictates that a player pull it all together and bring the absolute maximum physical, mental and emotional presence that they are capable of at this stage in their development. 

Stepping up means bursting past a performance plateau. This exceptional moment meets the test of the moment. Often players may not know they have it in them, but they achieve it. They step up.

A player can have a career game responding to the quality of the opposition or stakes of the game. They can have a break out performance or a breakout moment—they escape a tackle at a critical moment; they sack a quarterback to end a drive; they intercept a pass; they stop a run with an exceptional block or spike; they perform an extraordinary save. Each action not only personifies a great individual action but galvanizes a team. Stepping up can be contagious, and fellow teammates take heart from the action; they bear down more and give a more attention and energy. Not only does the opponent’s run stop, but momentum shifts as teammates gather up their focus and their collective performance rises.

Players on the verge of giving up recover. Coaches who started to call plays based on minimizing a loss take heart and re-infuse their play calling with risk and energy; they coach up, not down. A team comes back from behind.

Multiple players express their commitment to each other. They cheer and encourage each other. The team as a whole steps up, and the coaches respond in kind with deeper concentration and focus upon plays or the energy they convey to players.

To step up does not mean just to try harder. The player calls upon him or herself to attend more deeply, concentrate more intently and push their body and memory more powerfully. Step up involves physical and mental rising from a baseline to a higher baseline for a moment in time. It may presage a higher level of performance in the future for the player or team, but it succeeds for a moment, that is enough.

Successful stepping up expands a person’s imagination of the player he or she can become. To step up need not be a one shot moment, but a new possibility.

Sports Fan Ethics

Being a sports fan is an existential choice. It involves a way of being in the world and relating to other human beings. The point of the game is being a fan involves a moral stance. It means acting in ways that impact others and the game. This  means it involves obligations and responsibilities. As a friend of mine reminded me,  spectators refer to "the team" and fans use the word "we."

This all became clear to me when I realize how early this all starts. Last week a major scandal erupted in Florida where the parents and fans of little league football had been indicted for betting on the games and hiring coaches who had criminal records amongst other things. Along with the incredible cost to the young student athletes and the horrible role models this provided, it reminded me again of how deep and important being a fan can be to many people, a link that can cause the craziness of Florida or a fun and important way to link to community and study and admire a form of human mastery.

Games depend upon rules. Athletes depend upon rules and conceptions of form and excellence. The very idea of winning requires rules that define what constitutes excellence, achievement and winning. The essence of competition builds upon the idea that rules govern behavior. Competition without rules reduces to war.

As I suggested, fans shape the environment and impact the athletes and competition. This involves them in the game and their influence, unlike spectators and audiences, carries a set of obligations; to be a fan is a moral stance about loyalty, commitment and participation.

I don't want to go overboard here, but as fans, people act, influence others and model for others. They infuse social gatherings with their presence and they pass on loyalties and relations to those around them.

Ideally a fan appreciates the team and sport and athletes. A deep aspect of being a sports fan lies in the aesthetic enjoyment (no true fan would use words aesthetic enjoyment) of the beauty and pure form of the sport they love. Being a fan involves people in communities of like minded people, so they can share common identity, emotions and conversations. Fandom through blogdom, bars and office NCAA pools demonstrates  and creates a subculture of identity, community and conversation. It enables people not only to vent and gloat but to discuss and appreciate the fine points of the form of the sport and the dimensions of its players.

All this suggests that the moral world of being a fan should involve respect for the game, players and fellow travellers. It means that fans can argue and shout and scream and holler, but it should occur within the bounds of norms of respect (these are elastic norms since some groups can use profanity laced diatribes and still laugh with and at each other). Simply by actions, taunts, movements fans force the athletes brain do do more and subtly can subvert the attention needed for a fine motor skill activity under active stress. Fan actions matter and influence games, no matter what athletes claim.

Fans have obligations to at least understand the game; you often see this dynamic played out in teaching younger fans the nuances or the painful experience of watching two people on a date, one a fan and the other bemused but trying hard to attend to the fan's nuttiness. You also see it among fans who can acknowledge the other team's excellence, "good play,"  "nice call," "good shot." You try to teach this to kids and neophytes so that they understand this is about both the sport and the team.

The problems emerge because of the identity pathologies of any community. Fans can become more committed to winning than the team or sport. The obsession with winning can be tied to collective need to feel superior (welcome to war again). The winning drive can coexist with another dynamic of identity--the we/they black/white world of asserting my identity and value by devaluing another. Racism depends  upon this dynamic, so does sexism.

One of the crucial borderland obligations of sports fans is how to treat opposing players and teams. If the fans have overinvested their identity in winning alone (if a fan arrives at the point where they cannot acknowledge a great play by an opposing player, they have crossed a dangerous boundary). (I must confess I have spent a decade booing and hating Alex Rodriquez for his betrayal of the Mariners and still cannot bear to acknowledge that he has any worth as a player or human being for that matter).

Here is a critical boundary area for fan. It is part of the oblgation to root for their team. Heckling and getting into the other guys head is more problematic but fits for a good fan. But as a coach friend of mine said "if you heckle, be clever, be good, but don't be cruel." We all know and appreciate good heckling, but more than a few fans personalize their screams or worse they invoke racists, sexist or foreign baiting (I am amazed at the number of mindless fans who shout "USA" when an international player is under pressure even when their own team may have three internatioanl players of their own, but who said consistency had anything to do with fans.)

One of the classic ploys, in movies at least, is for a coed to flash an opposing player to deflect their attention. A very clever and very subversive act occurred several years ago when California coeds created a fake coed identity named Victoria who engaged in on line chats with a UCLA player. At the game the Cal. rooters revealed the "Victoria" cheer and even quoted textings in their jeers/cheers/heckles. It ruined the players night and revealed a very clever and subversive use of the social web world of athletes.

However more than a few fans stalk players, abuse players and coaches mercilessly with profanity, racist and sexist catcalls and remarkably ugly comments to the players, coaches and administrators on line and through web sites.  I've sat by benches where fans spat on the players and those  nearby. The pseudo anonymity of the web as well as the fact that internet flames are not tempered by any sense of how they impact the people encourages the same sort of amoral or immoral behavior of being in a crowd. People lose their sense of accountability, respect and appreciation of both the sport, the humans and their own responsibilities. People who believe they are anonymous or lost in a crowd will do things they would never do if held accountable as an individual.

Contagion is a psychological reality where the emotional and behavioral actions of one person can change the emotional affect of others. In economic terms bad fans drive out good fans. In social psychology the haunting example of the death of Kitty Genovese reminds us all that people will stand around while another person is murdered waiting for others to act. In fandom  this "bystander effect" encourages people to stand around while one obnoxious idiot spews invective to hurt the players and infect those around him. The picture here is of a young kid giving finger--is  this what we want to hand on as fans? Like racism, bad fanhood is learned and handed on.

Another crowd effect encourages the darkside of fans. Being in a crowd that feels anger and rage encourages people to feel release from their normal moral commitments. The crowd encourages a form of anonymity and people who believe they are anonymous will do things they would never do if alone and accountable. The soccer riots in Europe epitomize all these coming together. The recent killings of fans as people stood around and cheered resembled gang executions.

Moral and psychological life is strange. Every good aspect of being a fan carries a shadow. Identity, common fate and language, particpating with others in emotional expression, if turned ever so slightly, end up with vile cruelty to other teams, to human players and to other fans.

Being a good fan matters and carries obligations. 

How a Team Collapses: 2011 Mariners

My Mariners are not really in a death spiral, although it feels like it. My daughter tells me I tend to overdramatize things, but we Mariners’ fans are watching a complete team collapse. Today the team managed to stop their headlong pursuit to set a modern major league record for losses in a row; they had to settle for 17. This is not a choke where the stakes are high and the team has it all on the line and fails to play up to its capability. Now they are simply collapsing.

No one expected much of this team, and yet, for a glorious moment, they produced unexpectedly good baseball. Now they have collapsed into beyond pathetic and it got me wondering what happens when a team collapses?

A team collapses when it suddenly starts to play below its capabilities and enters a spiral of losing and declining competence fed by the losing. To collapse suggests the team has been performing well or at least OK, then it suddenly devolves to a lower, I mean awful, level of play. The Mariners were playing at or above their projected talent+skill+commitment capabilities. Then in a very short time, the team swoons to compete far below its talent+skill+commitment level. This results in a self-reinforcing corkscrew of losses reinforcing each other until the team has played itself out of contention.

A team collapse involves the well-documented psychological phenomenon of contagion. In a collapse, the low level of performance begins somewhere. In the Mariner’s case, the entire batting lineup, but especially the collapse of Sean Figgins and Ichiro who are both hitting about 70 points below their career averages.

Other players begin to feel obligated to up their game. Team members push themselves to try to do more than they are capable of. They try to hit homers when they are live drive hitters; they swing at marginal pitches; they lose patience. This singular response is compounded because team members lose trust in the other players. They believe that other players will not do their part. This lack of trust in the rest of the lineup motivates them to push harder, move beyond their comfort zone and strengths. If they were role players and had defined comfortable positions, they press beyond these and fail.

This pressing beyond talent+skill level leads to disaster. Leaving aside sudden blips, hot games or streaks, most good to average players will decline when they move beyond their comfort or strength zones. Pitchers will magnify the problems once the scouts let them know a batter is now vulnerable to new pitches. So player-by-player individuals fall into patterns of failure and fall below their norms and even below replacement value.  Suddenly you have a team that is last in the major leagues in 7 of 9 offensive categories and that is offensive (ugh!). Yesterday they set a record in Yankee stadium—18 strikeouts  against good but not great pitching. This only occurs when an entire team anxiously presses and swings at balls at bad or marginal pitches.As in the Yankee game, they flail, check swings, watch third strikes; they manifest a collective lack of decisive confidence in their ability to engage or hit.

The offense woes lead managers to play mix and match and call up anyone in the farm system that looks like a hitter. This approach generates chaotic and unreliable patterns in the in field. So precision infield play or outfield fielding efficiency plummets. The trusting communication and internalized sixth senses of trust and anticipation disappears. Fielders overplay and compensate and even ignore scouts. This results in more errors and egregious mistakes that erode trust further. The team brings up minor league “hitters” who are marginal outfielders, so mistakes multiply and bloopers become a sort of expected norm.

The slow collapse of hitting coupled with the gradual wearing down of fielding competence finally infects the pitchers, and this nailed the coffin shut.

The Mariners were held together by superb but young starting pitchers and journeymen relievers enjoying career years. But now the contagion spreads in the same way. Young pitchers like Michael Pineda start to over throw knowing they cannot rely on run support. Doug Fister and Jason Vargas both need control and fine fielding to work. But like Pineda, they are forced to try for more strikeouts because they cannot trust the fielding. The pressure on each pitch goes up because so little run support exists (Fister had 8 runs scored in 6 starts). So “pressure pitches” multiply which increases the stress load and impact on pitchers wearing down their mental focus more quickly.

Pitchers know they cannot afford mistakes because the fielding is no longer reliable and the offense cannot offset errors. The mental and physical strain of every pitch intensifies. Pitchers wear down faster and young pitchers even faster. Now every player's failure feeds their own lack of confidence and also infects every other players eroding competence. The psyche of the team guarantees failure because no one believes they can succeed with this group of team mates.

On top of this the pundits demand trades and heads to fall, everyone now finds himself mentioned in columns and potential trade bait. So every at bat and every pitch now becomes an audition to be traded; this of course fosters even more nervous tension as well as harvesting massive insecurity in a clubhouse.

At this point many teams give up. We see it all the time on the field when a coach loses control of the team. Players not just collapse in skill set but they quit trying or they quit caring which leads to the same result. The talent+skill equation depends upon the commitment level of give it life. The Mariners, unlike the last two years, are still playing as a cohesive unit and have neither given up nor taken to attacking each other. They do not manifest a complete death spiral where the team and the coach have lost control of their destinies. I witnessed this happen at Washington with Tyrone Willingham’s last college team.

17 losses in a row. They are not that bad; but they will never recover this year. Felix Hernandez staunched the record run; but more loss streaks on are the way and a slow agonizing season lies before us.