CANTON, OH — Three star athletes on an Ohio high school basketball team consider Paul Wackerly a bully, and if he was a teacher or even a 14-year-old student, there’d be little doubt that school officials would come down on him, and hard.
The three girls say that on the court, Wackerly called them disappointments, retards and worse — in tirades raining with clusters of F-Bombs and even threatening them physically.
The Ohio High School Athletic Association said that, mostly, Wackerly’s behavior was OK for one main reason: He’s not a kid; he’s a coach.
Bullying by a coach, according to its ruling, is not sufficient cause for a player to transfer to another school with the right to play a full season.
Around the country, millions of students report the same: Their coaches get away with not only bullying them verbally, but frequently physically, with slaps and kicks.
In the Ohio case, three senior basketball players — Addison Mucci, Erica Warren and Hayley Smith — said they transferred from GlenOak High School to escape Wackerly’s bullying, and are in court this week appealing the athletic association ruling that benches them for the second half of the season. The abuse, they said, began when they were freshmen.
If the court doesn’t see it their way, their season will be over Monday.
Their case highlights a key question facing educators and students around the country: Where does a coach cross the line that separates demanding coaching in a competitive, aggressive sport from flat-out bullying? It’s a pervasive problem, according to published research, affecting millions of kids every year.
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Parents of the three high school athletes say Wackerly, the athletic association’s 2019 “coach of the year,” crosses the line — regularly.
“People commenting on social media don’t understand the full story,” Jennifer Mucci, Addison’s mother, told Patch. “They say we’re helicopter parents protecting our snowflakes.
“These girls work hard; they’re driven,” Mucci said, pointing out they’ve played together since they were in elementary school and took a perfect 157-0 record to Wackerly’s program. “You don’t have that kind of record if you’re snowflakes.”
Addison’s confidence comes from pushing herself hard on the basketball court, but her mom said she saw that wilt “when Wackerly got his hands on her.”
“She got tired of being called a f—–g p—y, a f—–g disappointment, a f—–g retard,” Mucci said. “For three years, we stood behind that damned coach. These are amazing women who have been talked down to, belittled and berated over sports.”
Kara Smith, Hayley’s mother, said the coach’s treatment went beyond swearing at the girls.
According to court documents, Wackerly told Hayley when she was a freshman “that he had more knowledge in his pinky than her whole effing body, and that he will shove his hand up her ass and rip her heart out and stomp on it.”
It got to the point, Hayley’s mother said, “that I had to lay in bed with her and sing motivational songs, and send her motivational quotes during the day.”
The three basketball standouts helped lead the GlenOak Golden Eagles to a 23-3 season record last year under Wackerly. They earned a trip to the Final Four at the state tournament.
In June, they decided they’d had enough. They took their chances on the transfer rather than what they felt was the certainty of further abuse.
How Often Do Coaches Bully?
Though the Ohio High School Athletic Association’s ruling on the transfer rule hardship exemption, not Wackerly’s conduct, is a central issue in the court case, bullying by coaches is a problem nationwide.
In its report on youth sports bullying, The Washington Post cited a recent survey of 800 youth athletes that found more than a third of them had heard their coaches yell angrily at a kid for making a mistake; another 4 percent reported having seen a coach hit, kick or slap someone on a team. That equates to about 2 million kids a year who experience that kind of treatment from their coaches, the authors noted.
Another report, by Childhelp, found similar results in its pool of five studies: 40 percent to 50 percent of young athletes had experienced anything from mild harassment to severe abuse, and 4 percent reported their coach had hit, kicked or slapped them.
On the coaching side, 8 percent admitted encouraging athletes to hurt their opponents, 33 percent said they’d yelled at players for mistakes and 20 percent said they had made fun of a player with limited skills.
Failure to address bullying — whether on the sports court, classroom or online — can have lifelong consequences for the targets, experts told Patch in its long-running “Menace of Bullies” series.
Their grades can suffer. They’re more likely to struggle with substance abuse and mental health problems that carry over into adulthood. Their relationships can suffer. In some cases they kill themselves. And in some cases, they kill other kids — though research is still emerging on whether there are links between bullying and student suicide and bullying and school shootings.
In sports, “the real issue isn’t the line and one being crossed, but that coaches are still, knowingly or unknowingly, using aggressive or fear-based coaching that research has proven to be inferior to the positive coaching method we promote through PCA,” Ryan Virtue, of the Positive Coaching Alliance-Cleveland, told Patch.
“It’s more widespread than it should be in this day and age,” said Virtue, who isn’t involved in the dispute with the Ohio High School Athletic Association. “A lot of it comes from the simple fact that a lot of coaches played at a high level — they know the game, the drills and the X’s and O’s of it, but they don’t know how to teach it.”
Bullying can happen when the focus is on the win-loss record rather the purpose of high school sports “that will translate to the next step and beyond that, into their professional experiences,” Virtue said.
His organization, which says it has 3,500 partnerships with schools and youth sports organizations that reach 19.2 million kids, takes a research-based approach to coaching that counters the notion that tough, demanding coaches teach kids how to weather life’s storms.
“You hear that all the time, that it’s tough love,” Virtue said. “The important thing with that phrase is the word ‘love.’ If a kid doesn’t feel love, they’re not going to feel tough love.”
Positive coaching is often misunderstood and people often think it “just means soft — sunshine, rainbows, kumbaya and participation trophies, and that positive coaches don’t care about winning,” Virtue said. “Should winning be a goal? Of course, but [the mission of a program] has nothing to do with winning and everything to do with learning life lessons through grit, determination and goal-setting.”
‘Bullying Is Bullying’
The case of the three girls in Ohio has progressed to the Stark County Court of Common Pleas. Here’s how it got there:
The high school sports sanctioning body’s decision that basically gives a pass to bullying coaches was a final blow to the basketball players and their parents.
“Bullying is bullying, no matter who the bully is,” Kisha Warren, Erica’s mother, said. “This is even more concerning since it was a man in a position of authority over our teenage girls.”
Brett May, the Plain Local school superintendent, did not return Patch’s request for comment, but he told the Canton newspaper “he’s still our coach” and that “corrective action” would be taken.
May wrote in a letter obtained by the Repository that the substantiated incidents, including the two that violated board policy on bullying, “appear to be infrequent and do not appear to happen at all (or even most) practices or games.
“It appears that when aggravated over the past few years, the uses of profanity and the critiques viewed as harsh seem to be more pervasive to the players and parents,” the letter continued, along with an admonishment to the coach to stop using profanity and making demeaning comments to the girls he coaches.
Wackerly, who declined to share his side of the story with Patch, told the Canton newspaper the investigation cleared him, that he’d never said anything demeaning to the team, and that his coaching style has been unchanged since he joined the district in 2014 and is “who I am.”
That’s contrary to May’s comments.
Wackerly, who is not a teacher at the school and whose LinkedIn profile lists him as sales manager for a Canton manufacturing company, has compiled a 466-198 win-loss record over his 35-year coaching career. At GlenOak, the Golden Eagles have racked up 106 wins against 31 losses since 2014. The team’s record stands at 9-7 this year.
He also took his North Canton Hoover team to the state championship in 2002.
‘Do The Right Thing’
The Plain Local School District is not a party in the girls’ lawsuit and supports their appeal to the state athletic association, the girls’ attorney, Douglas Bond, told Patch. Wackerly, the coach, also is not named in the lawsuit.
“We’re trying desperately to get everyone simply to do the right thing,” Bond said. “You can’t hear [the girls’] story and have a question about what’s the right thing. Anybody who sees this behavior has to recognize it for what it is. The right thing is there. The Ohio High School Athletic Association has the ability to do the right thing.”
The athletic association did not return a phone call from Patch asking for comment.
Though backing their bid to play a full season, Plain Local school administrators turned their backs on the girls, their mothers said.
Other families sent letters of support, “but began to defect because they didn’t think [Wackerly] would get fired, and they didn’t want to leave their girls out to dry,” Mucci said. “But how can this school keep someone like this?”
In a story so stark, there’s also not-so-subtle irony: the Three girls, not yet in college, are facing another form of bullying, this from the very families their lawsuit could help.
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“They’ve done a wonderful job making new friends, but it’s very difficult to have parents and people at GlenOak saying bad things about them,” Kara Smith said. “They were the three leaders on the team, and they were sticking up not just for themselves but the entire team. The entire team was tired of it, but they are the ones who stood up.”
As part of a national reporting project, Patch has been looking at society’s roles and responsibilities in bullying and a child’s unthinkable decision to end their own life in hopes we might offer solutions that save lives.
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