The Rutgers men’s basketball coach Mike Rice wasn’t very nice. In fact, according to a video that surfaced Tuesday, he was godawful.

The video shows Rice pushing, hitting and kicking players, hurling basketballs at their legs and head, and unleashing a tirade of profanities and homophobic slurs.

The athletic director became aware of the video four months ago, but kept Rice on, punishing him but trying “rehabilitation.” It wasn’t until Wednesday, after the clip went viral and the outrage became deafening, that Rice was fired.

The issue that arises — beyond the coddling of outrageous behavior within elite sports franchises — is whether Rice is an outlier, and if so by how much?

From my experience, his behavior seems an a extreme version of what is generally accepted practice among some coaches, players and parents who turn a blind eye and even give a grudging nod of approval.

As background, I never played college sports, but I played for my school’s basketball teams from 6th to 12th grades for four different coaches. My experience and that of most male athletes I know appear to have common threads: coaches can be incredibly positive influences on athletes’ lives, and most are, but too many can also be temperamental and explosive, verbally abusive and misogynistic.

It is almost universally accepted that many coaches have wild mood swings. They’re quick to cry and quick to laugh, but also quick to pull or push athletes into place, yell at and berate players, and throw anything they can get their hands on.

The logic is that these coaches give athletes the worst in order to get the best out of them. But at what cost?
People excuse — or even celebrate — such behavior as a passion. But, let’s call it by its real name: abuse.

Reading it as simple passion is a perversion of the word. Excusing it as an accepted method of whipping athletes into psychological shape, of conditioning them to the ebbs and flows of anxiety, or to numbing them to normality, neglects the negative lessons imparted.

According to Child Trends, a Washington research group, about two-thirds of 8th and 10th graders and more than half of all high school seniors participated in school athletics in 2011, the most recent year for which data were available.

In general, this is a good thing. According to a 2009 study by researchers at the University of Northern Iowa: “High school athletic participation is associated with an array of positive outcomes, including high school GPA, college attendance, college completion, adult income and earnings, job quality, and beneficial health behaviors.”

But the same study found that: “Male high school athletes in particular report higher levels of alcohol consumption, drunk driving, sexist and homophobic social attitudes, gender related violent activity, and same sex violence (fighting).”

So the Rutgers incident, in its own way, once again shines a light on the broader, poisonous culture in which masculinity is narrowly drawn, where physical violence is an acceptable outlet for male emotion, and poor performance is categorically associated with femininity.

What are the effects of such warped reasoning, when boys groomed by jock culture must operate in a wider culture increasingly more accepting of gender and sexual identity variance, and more insistent on gender equality?

Do coaches like Rice strengthen the boys’ bodies but weaken their minds? I would submit that for some the answer is yes, and that this phenomenon is a continuing retardant on a more civil society.

But it doesn’t have to be, and this is not the mode of operation for many coaches. There are many coaches who know how to push without putting down. They know how to get respect while giving it. Their teams are not democracies, but neither are they brutal dictatorships. They know that the boys in their care will one day be men who must care for others.

The good coach must not only be the model, but must teach our child athletes that there is a line between demanding and demeaning that no one who truly cares for others would cross.

A program begun in 2001 by Futures Without Violence (formerly the Family Violence Prevention Fund) called Coaching Boys Into Men is based on that maxim. The program “seeks to reduce dating violence and sexual assault, is effective in discouraging teen dating violence and abusive behaviors” by providing coaches with training kits that “illustrate ways to model respect and promote healthy relationships and choices among young men.”

According to a study released by the program last year, boys who participated were “significantly more likely to report intervening to stop disrespectful or harmful behaviors among their peers,” and “slightly more likely to recognize abusive behaviors.” They also “reported less verbal and emotional abuse against a female partner.”

We need more movement in this positive direction.

More coaches need to model behavior that says being a gentleman and a letterman aren’t mutually exclusive.