[JohnnyB]

Reading other people's stories has had me thinking more of experiences I had when I was younger in sports. I have to say, I had a lot of great coaches who were very good people and really gave of themselves to everyone on the team when I was growing up, but I did have one coach while playing division one soccer in Calgary who I now clearly see as having been essentially bullying me and targeting me to treat like garbage. It was things like speaking to me in demeaning ways in front of the team, targeting me with criticism in front of team mates, not letting me play regardless of performance or putting me on the field and then immediately pulling me off without any cause. He would just screw around with me regardless of my performance or how hard I was working for the team.

As a kid, I was just trying to do my best to succeed. Listening to what my coach was telling me was part of how I had been taught to do that. It made me feel like garbage, but I didn't believe there wasn't anything I could do. I really cared and didn't want to quit the team, and he was in control of the team. As a young person, you also just tend to put faith in adults who are in positions of leadership and assume they're there for good reason.

Looking back with the perspective of an adult, especially having worked for years with responsibility for the care of thousands of young people, I think of a grown person treating a kid like that and can clearly see it was wrong and the guy was an adult who was bullying a child. At the same time, I also see that he was probably in that coaching position partly because he was a person with rather poor personal/professional ethics and was trying to take advantage of every opportunity to advantage his own son, who was also a player on the team and certainly received preferential treatment.

It's not uncommon to see people like that work to get those positions while others with more pure intentions aren't motivated to compete for the same role. I also understand that there was likely zero oversight system preventing him from acting the way he was because it wasn't a very sophisticated organization. In any event, as young person on the team dealing with an adult in a position you're taught to trust and respect, I didn't have perspective to fully appreciate what was going on. As an adult who has since gained that perspective, were I to look at that coach as a peer and see what he was doing, I would be disgusted.

Abuse of power and bullying is certainly not limited to physical, sexual or verbal abuse. There are many creative ways that people find to abuse power over others and it's not a slippery slope into victim culture to begin openly identifying and addressing these many ways people can abuse their authority. Fair judgments regarding abuses can be made, especially if those in authority over these systems have undergone training and education around identification and how to deal with it.

An open culture of recognizing and refusing to accept abuses of power is a good thing. It's a step towards having better organizations and better experiences for generations of people to come, both during their childhoods and their adult lives.