Sustaining and Disrupting Psychologically Abusive Coaching Practices: An Archival Case Examination of National Hockey League Coach Mike Babcock
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The athlete maltreatment crisis and associated cover-ups in sport have received considerable public attention. Calls have been made to critically reflect on broader social norms or features of the sport domain that may enable and sustain such behaviors. To demonstrate the systemic nature of maltreatment, we provide a critical analysis of the case of Mike Babcock, a highly regarded coach in the National Hockey League who reportedly engaged in psychologically abusive conduct throughout his career. Utilizing Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, we discuss macrosystem-, exosystem-, mesosystem-, and microsystem-level factors that enabled Babcock to allegedly engage in psychologically abusive behaviors with adult male athletes in professional ice hockey without consequences. We also highlight several reasons as to why, after so many years (chronosystem), Babcock’s coaching methods received appropriate criticism. To advance the field of kinesiology, we suggest the importance of embedding maltreatment prevention and intervention education in kinesiology programs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".