A Holistic Outlook of Professional Athletes

By: Duncan Fletcher

If you’ve played hockey or sport at any level, you’ve heard the references to being too ‘gripped up’ or ‘stressed’ to perform effectively. In hockey you hear, ‘you’re gripping the stick too tight’, or ‘you’re trying too hard to make it happen’, or ‘don’t force the puck, let it come to you’.

There are truths in these statements, but is important to note that they refer to what the athlete should be doing solely within the construct of the game. They are reflective of old school ideology which views athletes as nothing more than millionaire robots that can compartmentalize sport from all other aspects of their lives and perform on cue. This is an ideology that needs to die.

Athletes are under immense pressure to succeed. Few would debate that. In very few other fields can a sub par performance result in your job loss as quickly as in professional athletics. This immense pressure to perform cannot exist in a vacuum. How does it manifest itself? Perhaps, excessive womanizing? Maybe drinking a bit too much? Over indulgent participation in vacuous activities, for instance video games, card games, shopping…?

Corporations that viewed their employees as automatons programmed to perform rote tasks for the benefit of the greater good who were than discarded to the scrap heap once their productive lives were over, are archaic corporate fossils. How is this pre-historic thinking allowed to exist in professional athletics? Companies all over the planet are making huge strides to provide working environments that incorporate and accommodate their employee’s whole lives.

Why isn’t the development of pro athletes viewed from a holistic perspective? Elite performance doesn’t stem from rote performance of a given skill. Elite performance can’t be accessed if only one aspect of the athlete has been developed. The same issues that impact modern corporations and their employees apply just as fluidly to professional sports organizations and their athletes. In fact the responsibility of sports organizations should be even greater, in light of the young age that these ‘companies’ are charged with their employees ‘development’.

However, they don’t and here’s why.
- Athletes make a lot of money. This isn’t their problem of course. The market dictates their value. And they only make a lot of money compared to the guy on the street. Business owners and those in finance make athletes look like suckers for chump change.
- People are inherently jealous of professional athletes and everyone thinks they would be in the same position too if wasn’t for…(insert injury claim or bad luck story here).
- They are media subjects and therefore easily objectified.
- They are managed predominately by other former athletes, who to be charitable, in the majority of cases, don’t get it. This links directly to…
- The wife beater syndrome. You see your dad beat his wife. You end up doing the same. The translation being, current general managers in the game were churned through the same system that they are now currently managing. It is a closed loop. How can they do anything differently if they don’t know what different is?

My point being that performance can’t only be linked to what is occurring between the boards or on the field. Advice or development strategies that are directed solely at developing athletic skills are half assed and hare brained. Professional sports organizations need to take the holistic development of their young men seriously in order to create win-win situations for the athlete and the team.