Among the most frequent arguments supporting involvement in sports, and the beneficial outcome from participation in sport, is purported power of sport to teach team discipline - and self-discipline. Variations on this theme abound and hardly anyone can avoid hearing one or another version. It sounds good and it connects sport to an American ideal, but what is the actual relationship between sport participation and development of self-discipline?
Discipline in general is defined by conformance to rules or guidelines, submission to a training regimen, persistence in a structured program, or similarly ordered behavior. Having a definition, however, is no more than a first step to understanding the relationship between sport participation and self-discipline. Real understanding requires consideration of the contexts and situations that lead people to infer discipline. People attribute self-discipline to someone whose conformance, submission, or persistence occurs without coercion from external forces and is not dictated by immediate comfort and pleasure. Do you infer self-discipline from compliance that leads to more immediate pleasure would rather than nonconformance would. People do not infer self-discipline in situations where someone does what feels good, when someone follows the easy route, or does what they wanted and preferred to do at the moment. Instead, we infer self-discipline when we observe people deny present comfort, make extra effort at some meaningful cost, delay gratification and rewards, reject immediate satisfaction, control momentary impulses, etc.
Self-discipline has meaning only if it arises internally rather than being imposed from an external force, when the actor in the situation him/herself sets or accepts the rules, guidelines, or boundaries and stays with them despite experiencing relatively more immediate discomfort than would accompany available alternatives. Would anyone attribute self-discipline to a person who, as soon as a supervisor was absent, ignored guidelines that required difficult and unpleasant effort to opt for effortless ease? Of course not - we attribute self-discipline when someone stays on a challenging and demanding course of action without immediate oversight, independent of externally imposed supervision. How does sport relate to such situations?
Sports definitely hold great potential for teaching self-discipline. All successful athletes, no matter what their genetic gifts, have to learn how to tolerate immediate discomfort in return for longer term benefit, (i.e., benefits of strength or aerobic endurance training.) They also have to learn how to conform with rules, guidelines, and boundaries - at first, learning that discipline by having their compliance supervised by outside authorities (i.e., parents, coaches, teammates) and then ideally internalizing both the need for discipline and the abilities to self-direct it. External authorities have myriad opportunities to model discipline, explain it, and enforce it during practices and contests. Athletes have equally numerous opportunities to observe it, imitate it, benefit from it, challenged and be corrected by it.
Given this rich opportunity, how are sports doing with its responsibility to enhance self-discipline? At least in some areas, the picture is rather grim and hardly anyone could judge certain sport situations to be achieving much enhancement of athletes’ self-discipline. Consider the number of athletes who can not say no to illegal drugs and promiscuous, or irresponsible sexual behavior. How common has it become that physically gifted athletes commit spouse or partner abuse, get involved in other forms of violence, even murder, and otherwise demonstrate worse than just inadequate self-discipline. Moving to less obvious forums that highlight a lack of self-discipline, but perhaps just as powerful images for other athletes to model, what does a domineering, authoritarian coach teach about self-discipline? What lessons in self-discipline does someone learn from relinquishing all decisions, even down to when and where they eat, what they wear, etc., to external authority? Many real lessons are learned through observing others’ behaviors, not by listening to words that are inconsistent with actions.
If sport is to fulfill one of its potentials and contribute to more Cal Ripkens, Bonnie Blairs, Michael Johnsons, Mia Hamms, Donna DeVaronas, etc., instead of more Latrell Sprewells, John Dalys, and the incredibly large number of athletes using illegal, performance-enhancing drugs, what is needed?
Unequivocal and consistent demonstration by parents, coaches, officials, and anyone allowed a leadership position in sport at any level of self-discipline in their own habits - not just their sport-related behaviors. It is who they are, what they do and don’t do, when they are not under externally imposed rules that provides the most important view of the self-discipline they are modeling - whether or not they intend that. The youth coach who refrains from smoking in the dugout but cannot keep from lighting up just outside the fence on the way to the car is not modeling self-discipline - and is teaching a different lesson than waiting to smoke until home.
Decisions by sport authorities from National Governing Bodies to collegiate and high school associations to various youth sport organizations to athletic clubs, local leagues, and parents must convey unequivocally that everyone in sport is expected to demonstrate self-discipline. Anyone falling short of the highest standards of self-discipline should suffer serious consequences without delay or plea-bargaining. Apocryphal or not, the story of Bjorn Borg’s father putting Bjorn’s racket in the closet for weeks and forbidding any tennis during that time as a consequence for young Bjorn’s loss of self-control during a match provides an excellent example of sport being used to teach self-discipline. In marked contrast, the not-so-subtle lesson in Bob Knight’s vaunted compliance with NCAA rules but persistent inability to curb his words and deeds in other, less highly legislated areas of his professional life illustrated utter lack of self-discipline.
Attention and accolades should be reserved for those sport participants who demonstrate self-discipline rather than those who were disciplined only when external authorities, be they coaches, parents, or governing bodies, are present in sufficient force to impose controls. Less media coverage of those athletes whose celebrations indicate that they have no control over themselves and more attention to athletes who, like Walter Payton clearly show great enthusiasm and excitement, but in ways that are consistent with the self-discipline that led to their success.
There needs to be willingness to risk occasional shortcomings and mistakes that result from less-than-perfect external control by someone else such as a parent or coach so that self-discipline might truly be developed in the athlete. Like any other set of skills, self-discipline will not spring forth in a complete and finished form without some mistakes and errors from which powerful lessons are learned. But, like any other set of skills, it cannot become the individual’s own skill so long as its control is vested in another, exercised by someone else. It has to be put in the athlete’s own hands, given to the athlete if it is to become his/her own.