This past weekend I was invited to speak at the Water Polo Coaches Association National Conference at UCSD, held in conjunction with the NCAA Championships. As I did at last year’s conference, I spoke on two issues near to my heart. The first, goalkeeping, is an easy one, as I pack 15 years of goalie coaching into one hour. The second talk, though, I tend to get more excited about, if not a bit nervous. It focuses on sport ethics, and it’s interactive in that about half of the session involves audience members—experienced coaches from all levels up through the Olympics—talking in small groups and then reporting back regarding their thoughts on the muddy world of sports ethics. This differs from doing this at a Sports Ethics conference in which there’s explicit interest by virtue of the conference title. It’s a huge credit to the organizers of the event to even take this risk, and equally laudable that they find the topic relevant enough to devote one of only seven slots to it.
As has been the case every time I give such an interactive talk, the buzz of the group was palatable. I had to cut the small group discussions short—something any teacher loathes to do—so we could return to the program, and participants had some fascinating and somewhat nuanced insights to offer. What follows is a brief connecting-the-dots of the discussion, using primarily comments from attendees as my fodder.
We began by examining water polo’s version of soccer’s “flopping”—when a player simulates being fouled despite no actual foul occurring. In water polo, as in soccer, this explicitly violates the rules: if a player with the ball simulates being fouled, then the offending player loses possession of the ball.1 Yet this differs greatly from how the game is actually played, in which nearly every player at every level draws—i.e. simulates—fouls consistently throughout the course of a game.
One coach began the conversation suggesting, if players refuse to “flop” then they are at a disadvantage relative to those who do, summarizing her position with the adage, “What’s rewarded is repeated.” She nicely highlights a clear problem with behaving ethically in any arena in which those who cheat benefit, leaving the cheated in the lurch: ethical but on the short end of the proverbial stick. When cheaters do repeatedly prosper, it seems to sway the non-prospering non-cheaters. And in a closed-system like sport, cheating becomes the norm.
This relates directly to the culture-based argument (discussed in various instances on this blog). When determining right actions in sport, the ethos—how the game is actually played—can seem to supersede the stated letter of the rule. As one coach noted, while water polo rules also prohibit grabbing, every player grabs while guarding on the perimeter. If the “no grabbing” rule were enforced, the game would consist only of fouls. But some might argue, rightly, that this puts the cart before the horse: we don’t want to first discover what players do and then build the rules around that. Instead, we should construct the rules and force the players to abide by them, lest we allow the inmates to run the asylum.
This point was followed with the aphoristic tidbit, “There must be honor amongst thieves.” Interestingly, the coach offered this in a positive light: while all players bend—and break—rules, they do it together, in an agreed-upon manner, as active members within the particular culture.
But just as the group seemed to collectively nod their heads, another coach offered a rhetorical question: But isn’t this behavior cheating? I repeated her question to the group, framing it thusly: Is intentionally breaking a rule in order to deceive the referee thus gaining an advantage cheating? This seems to be the exact definition of cheating. In addition, this all requires that we include referees themselves under the banner of thieves: they see the grabbing and the simulating and allow it, all because that’s just how the game is played.
And so, as the previous collective head-nodding now turned to head-shaking, one coach refocused our lens to the common phenomenon of a player over-embellishing an actual foul. Known as “selling” a foul, this occurs when players are actually being fouled but the fouling goes undetected. If a player is being fouled, but the referee doesn’t recognize it as such, then acting just a bit—some subtle flopping and simulating—helps the referee make a call which is correct, though otherwise overlooked. How, then, do we assess selling a foul in order to get what you otherwise deserve? This sort of simulating seems justified.
As our time together was coming to an end, the coaches were looking for something pragmatic to result from all of this. Once we agreed that we did not want the inmates running the asylum, nor so-called “thieves” looking to see what they could get away with (even honorably), nor encouraging a culture of deception, we realized that the rule-makers and referees needed to make the change: determine the ethical way to play the game and map the rules onto that. And then enforce the rules. We are in charge of how this activity transpires, and we value ethical play and having our athletes pursue what is right and good.
This all provided another opportunity to recognize the unique position of coaches and educators and culture-creators in regards to a respective sport’s ethos. We are not the victims of rules but create the rules. Sport is a human-made institution, not something handed down from Olympus. Our rules can and should reflect this. In this sense, we mandate goodness from our athletes, transforming a den of thieves into something more akin to what an idealized vision of athletics on Olympus would actually embody.
1The rules actually require the referee to issue a yellow card to a team that repeatedly simulates and can even assign the penalty of “misconduct” which results in the offending player’s removal from that game.
