Anon Gym communication about behavior/culture?

[Anonymous (89a8)]

How often (if ever) does your gym communicate about perceived team-wide culture issues? Is it done by email or by team meeting? I’ve been part of other sports with occasional chats when things needed to be discussed, but it happened at an age where they were old enough that coaches would communicate it directly to athletes in team meetings.

My daughter's gym doesn't have annual parent meetings and information about team-wide stuff is shared by email and athlete-specific stuff is usually handled with a scheduled call.

We have received multiple recent emails about topics like attendance, dishonesty, etc. that note that it is just some of the athletes and that they've been talked to 1:1 but if it occurs again, the consequences are x, y, z.

Are the coaches just building a paper trail for future disciplinary action? Or is this a red flag when it comes to gym culture and teammates? Is this normal? I feel awful getting scolding emails about something my child hasn't done, and surprised that neither my daughter nor I picked up on what was going on.

 

[Anonymous (a3c1)]

I've seen it a few times when my daughter was younger where we would have whole level or even multiple level meetings with the coaches centered around issues happening in the gym. Now that my daughter is older and a higher level, I feel very out of the loop. Every once in a while I hear from my daughter or another mom about something going on with the team and I am usually taken by surprise. Personally, I would not mind getting an email from the coaches letting me know when issues are happening at the gym so I would be informed and know what to talk to my daughter about. But I can understand your concerns with it too if it is happening that frequently.

 

[Aussie_coach]

I don’t generally do it (gym owner). If there is a culture issue 99% of the time it’s our fault. Culture starts from the gym owner and is filtered down through the coaches.

Sometimes I might send an email to educate, never to scold. Newer families don’t always understand the importance of attendance, uniform etc. Of that’s the case, it’s not done in a negative way. Just talking about why we do things the way we do.

But culture and behaviour issues are our responsibility. If there is social problems, we look at what we can do to build tram bonding.

If there is competition between gymnasts we look at what we can do to help them be excited and celebrate each other successes.

If there are behaviour issues we look at how we are running and managing our classes.

If there is a problem with a specific athletes behaviour we may have a private chat with that family to see how we can next work through the issues.