Caring Before It’s Personal
Couple of things that this post (originally on IG by @thegistusa) stirred in me when I first saw it during my usual doom scrolling last night:
YES YES YES…such a spot on naming of a frustration I can only imagine weighs heavily on women as they hear and see so many men get some sort of figurative “badge of honor” for leading off their “allyship” with “Well, you know I’m a girl dad”
And it we’re being honest, this runs rampant in our sports ecosystems. Whether that be a coach, a player or a adjacent administrator or executive, someone somewhere decides this week’s Gameday must lead with a “well, I finally stopped being a complete dick when my daughter was born”.
It led me back to one of the more powerful (but also likely to cause awkward silence) graphics we’ve used and helped coaches use with their players for a few years (see below)
You post this up on a film screen before a session with your guys, and let me tell you, as someone who has done it, you’re going to get a combination of head nods, tilted head confusion and telling silence.
If you do this in your STAFF MEETING room beforehand, you might even get SCOFFS and deflection, because if I’m being honest, I know in certain spaces, certain teams or audiences that I’ve led and spoken to, it’s always SAFER to lead with “Think about your mom or your girlfriend going through this” than “Yo, you should give a damn about any woman you encounter because they have inherent value as a human being.”
It’s a bigger lift.
IT SHOULD NOT BE.
But it is.
And I think it’s okay to hit dudes in the face with the hypocrisy of ONLY giving a damn about VAW in the context of “your” woman is harmed.
Because in that world, we’re still in some gross version of “ownership” of the women in our lives. We’re still living some “white knight savior” nonsense. And we’re still indifferent to harm to strangers, which we know is not the actual definition of a community that cares for one another.
Finally, if you are a coach who claims (like we all do, and I believe is true) that your true calling is building better men for their future lives as husbands and dads…is it really a successful formula to have him WAIT to give a shit about women until he is married or fathers one?
My god, in our “reps to prep for the game” world of sport, that’s literally akin to “hey, we are going to start giving a damn about that game…at kickoff. NOT practice before, film before, weights before…nope, not until actual kickoff. See ya there.”
Coach Prompts
When talking with your players about harm toward women, how often do you rely on “imagine if that were your mom/sister/girlfriend”? What might happen if you removed that framing?
What are you actively rehearsing now with your male athletes that prepares them to care about and advocate for women later?
Where might your own language unintentionally teach players that women deserve care because of their relationship to men rather than because of their inherent humanity?
Player Prompts
Why do you think “imagine if that was your mom/sister/girlfriend” can feel more convincing than simply saying a woman deserves to be treated with dignity?
What changes when you cross out sister, mother, daughter, and wife and leave only “She’s someone”?
If caring about people is something we can practice, what is one “rep” you can take now rather than waiting until the issue becomes personal?
