Love in Basketball: Transforming Inappropriate Power in Men's College Basketball Coaching through a Servant-Led Response and Companionate Love

Abstract

In the summer of 2003, the Baylor University’s men’s basketball program was ripped apart when student-athlete Carlton Dotson murdered his teammate and roommate, Patrick Dennehy. While the details surrounding the events are still unknown, the abhorrent tale, which weaves a tapestry of drug use, gun violence, and unstable behavior, was held as an example of the moral decay of big-money college sports. And it remains the only known case of a student-athlete killing a teammate in the history of U.S. intercollegiate athletics (Wise, 2008). The story fails to simply end with tragic violence; investigations revealed deception, lies, manipulation, and an attempted cover-up by Dave Bliss, the head men’s basketball coach at Baylor from 1999-2003, which led to his 10-year ban from the NCAA (Dewitt, 2008; Wise, 2003, 2017). Later, in his 2015 memoir and a 2017 documentary about the events of 2003, Bliss paints the picture of a redeemed man accepting personal responsibility (Bliss et al., 2015; Kondelis, 2017). Yet, in a moment where Bliss believes the cameras to be off, he continues to disparage Dennehy and, perhaps, once again the nature of leadership embedded in inappropriate power. Instances of this style of leadership, and accompanying manifestations of displays of abuse, manipulation, self-embeddedness and violence, seem to be common practice in college basketball. John Brannen, former head men’s basketball coach at the University of Cincinnati, was fired in May 2021 due to using tactics of intimidation and providing benefits prohibited by NCAA legislation to a student athlete (Jenkins, 2021). Two head coaches have resigned over the last two seasons due to using racial slurs and racially insensitive language around student athletes, and at least two more have been investigated by their universities for similar comments (“Basketball coach out,” 2021; Borzello, 2020, 2021; Hanson, 2021). These are just some of the examples of which we have public record. While on one hand these examples might merely represent extreme cases, perhaps this represents only the tip of the iceberg, with actions and behaviors so alarming that they warranted headlines. Federal, internal, NCAA, and journalistic investigations reveal that much more goes on behind closed doors and outside of the view of the public, but the strings of the thread of leadership centered in inappropriate power drive remain. Such leadership can neutrally be characterized as hierarchy-driven, rules-based, and authoritative; this is not a power that liberates or empowers, but manipulates and controls, dominates and suppresses. With leadership embedded in such inappropriate power drive regularly occurring in men’s college basketball coaching, the purpose of this paper is to more greatly understand the expression, manifestations, and consequences of such leadership, explore a possible transformation arc and inward journey toward a servant-led response and more healthy expression of power, and examine how such a response may be sustained, and what might be experienced as a result, in men’s college basketball coaching with a foundation of servant-leadership and an emotional culture of companionate love.