VANDERBILT former athlete exposes mentally harmful coaching in new article

here wrote:

Then don’t write a blog crying about it after you just received 250k in free university and a coach was a little mean to you.

When it COSTS schools virtually nothing to have you show up to class and compete for them, I'd say calling it 250k is questionable.

WinnytheBish wrote:

here wrote:

Then don’t write a blog crying about it after you just received 250k in free university and a coach was a little mean to you.

When it COSTS schools virtually nothing to have you show up to class and compete for them, I'd say calling it 250k is questionable.

Before anyone comments on this, I know exactly how much it costs to have an athlete on a team. I'm just saying calling it "free college" is misleading since they could have gone anywhere else.

So everyone freaked out that Salazar was acting like a nutritionist with Cain. Which he is supposedly unqualified for. And people say the same with college coaches all the time (esp with women. Heaven forbid they say being fat is not ideal for a distance runner).

And now we're slamming coach for not acting as a mental health professional which they are unqualified to be??? It's not the coaches job or place to act as a mental health advisor Jesus Christ. If coaches did that when there's an inevitable bad thing that happens then we'd have another article shouting "omg why was this coach acting In a capacity beyond coaching, this isn't their place, they're not even qualified to do this. Blablabla"

So correct me if I am wrong but Rebekah Smeltzer is the coach in question...

Some are saying that this girl was a train wreck before she got to Vandy etc etc.. but so what, once she’s on your team and you’re her coach.. she becomes your train wreck. After all you recruited her and you apparently didn’t see any red flags or you just figured this person was the right fit for your program...

Either way you have to learn how to coach her. You as the coach have to facilitate an environment for her to try to succeed. At the least get the right support staff involved.

But this is what happens when you power5 head coaches keep hiring these women with no experience. Come on this is where these goofball decisions come into play. The coach doesn’t isn’t all to blame, but a bad coach with no experience is why this got to where it did.

blackhorse wrote:

No one is arguing that the coach is solely responsible for the mental health of the athlete. But it is their responsibility to coach them in a way that doesn't actively harm their mental health, which this coach clearly failed to do

Again, how do you know this? Do you have anything, anything at all, other than a one sided essay, to go on? Are you personally involved in this situation? Perhaps you hate women in leadership positions. Clearly, you are a misogynist.

WinnytheBish wrote:

When it COSTS schools virtually nothing to have you show up to class and compete for them, I'd say calling it 250k is questionable.

I agree.

It's like saying, "The owner gave me a $15 pizza to eat after work."

In reality, the pizza ingredients may have cost $4.

You can't just go by the sticker price of a college semester.

Allegedly. The athlete claims this but we don't know what actually happened or was said because we only have the singular point of view reporting. Better to read this piece as more of an op/ed than actual news journalism.

Unfortunately these stories are nothing new, but hopefully writing about them will help improve the culture. Before whistleblowing & #metoo I Anonymously documented my own experience with mental health & college athletics in the e-book She Was Once a Runner . I’m happy to see that the culture has evolved to where women feel safe in revealing their identities & the institutions they attended.

malmo wrote:

verycommon wrote:

Unfortunately a very common and overlooked part of the sport. It's rare these days to find a competent college coach that values the wellbeing of each of their athletes regardless of performance. .

I would never associate with a coach whose first priority wasn't for the mental, emotional, academic and/or professional interests of his athletes.

Wait, didn't you run for Harry Groves? How well would this women have done with him as her coach? - I highly doubt things would have worked out better. The point is not that Harry wasn't a great coach - he was - just that sometimes its not as simple as taking one sides viewpoint, or assuming a coach as unsympathetic, incompetent, or negligent based on a sample size of one.

A somewhat unrelated topic about Vanderbilt athletics, but it made me wonder. Do all major college athletic departments have such blatantly non-athletic related jobs ? Is money so easily squandered in college sports ?

“Vanderbilt sent emails Monday to athletics communications department employees stating the department was being absorbed by the university and that some key positions were eliminated.”

https://www.tennessean.com/story/sports/college/vanderbilt/vanderbiltinsider/2020/07/07/vanderbilt-eliminating-athletics-communications-department/5392447002/

So many of you missed the point.

The job as a coach isn't to just give out workouts. If that were true then we've left out the "human" part of coaching and basically it should just be emailed to them weekly. Nor is it their job to have an hour meeting with each athlete on a regular basis, yet interacting is still very important. If you truly don't care about your athletes, then why coach?

The Coach clearly was doing workouts that were unattainable for many, not just Kacie. Combine that with a fragile person, male or female, and bad things can happen, not just injuries which certainly doesn't help. The athlete then questions as to why they are even running?

When an athlete comes to you, you have to listen and show that you care. I've coached at the Collegiate level before, yes I really have. If the athlete does their part and speaks up, you have to listen and come up with a fair solution. If she were their number one runner and having the same issues with just injuries alone, the Coach would NOT have responded the same way. Unfortunately, there is a pecking order that should not exist (I never did that, not once).

The young lady felt shut down which only compounded the problem. For those of you who say she can't do that for every runner and that she has a job to do, she's NOT doing that for every runner as they'd all be injured and she'd look even worse as a Coach. Runners should be able to speak up if they are too beat up and can't complete a workout that is simply asking too much and may lead to injuries. All Coaches do not set the same workouts from College to College, that doesn't happen. Some simply don't know what they are doing and think this or that workout makes their athletes tougher (see what happened to Tsai).

Argue all you want, but if Kacie is being honest with what was said, the Coach bears a lot of the responsibility for her repeated injuries. Runners is hard and not everyone gets injured, but many don't reach their true potential as they are never rested and fully recovered to run a solid race.

For me, I support this young lady and what she went thru. At the very least, the Coach should have shown more compassion and learned to be a better listener, sometimes compassion is all it takes. Or the toughen up approach and roll the dice:(

p.s. they've only got 6.3 billion dollars in endowments

You keep doing it, trying to tell somebody what their job entails when it is only your opinion of how you would perform. Every school and every coach has a different idea of what their job is and a different style. It is up to athketes and parents to find a coach that fits their desires. It is not up to the coach to change for the athkete. Athketes can transfer. Some athletes will be unhappy with the coach. Too bad.

It is entirely possible that she is being honest with what she said and, at the same time, completely wrong. Viewing the world through the lens of mental illness can easily lead to misunderstanding and misconception. I simply can not understand how some of you can be so quick to crucify this coach without impartial corroboration. If you have information that we have not seen, by all means share it. God forbid that any of you ever end up on a jury.

The sooner college sports collapse, the better.

Crucify the coach? Crucify? That's ludicrous at best and the only response you'll get from me.

Visisted Vandy wrote:

Viking21 wrote:

It is entirely possible that she is being honest with what she said and, at the same time, completely wrong. Viewing the world through the lens of mental illness can easily lead to misunderstanding and misconception. I simply can not understand how some of you can be so quick to crucify this coach without impartial corroboration. If you have information that we have not seen, by all means share it. God forbid that any of you ever end up on a jury.

Crucify the coach? Crucify? That's ludicrous at best and the only response you'll get from me.

Honestly, it's the only response I expected from you. After all, when you present opinions as facts, you are somewhat limited when asked for corroboration.

I don't think the injuries is the real issue at play here. Of course a coach is responsible for an injury if they don't take the proper precautions for an athlete. The problem is her pointing the finger at her coach and athletic department for her degrading mental health.

facts and reason wrote:

WinnytheBish wrote:

When it COSTS schools virtually nothing to have you show up to class and compete for them, I'd say calling it 250k is questionable.

I agree.

It's like saying, "The owner gave me a $15 pizza to eat after work."

In reality, the pizza ingredients may have cost $4.

You can't just go by the sticker price of a college semester.

Actually at a lot of schools the athletic department is separate from the school finance-wise. So athletics has to pay the school full cost (or whatever the scholarship is). This happens at both public and privates and they don’t get a discount or tuition waiver or anything.

Also keep in mind this was the distance assistant coach...these 2nd or 3rd distance coaches are often given the Title IX fodder, problem athletes or, at best, the athletes that need a couple years to develop. Athletes not deserving of the head coach’s attention either way. Problem is that the SEC isn’t for “development” and I doubt Vanderbilt is either (maybe one of the few conferences that still care about Olympic sport results as opposed to just “not pissing people off?”). It’s entirely possible that - as another poster noted - this coach was doing exactly as her boss (the head distance coach) and her bosses boss told her. She may have done her job perfectly according to the person signing her check. This is assuming again that the original one-sided account is accurate.