The Essence of My Coaching Is to Serve: Monty Williams, Faith, and Relationality
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Relationships and relationship building are probably the most important component a coach can have when it comes to building a TEAM. In most cases, coaches are tasked to establish relationships that are built on trust, commitment, accountability, hard work, and belief in the process. Coach Monty Williams takes it one-step further by adding the element of Faith and Relationality as way of creating relationships. In this abstract, the researcher calls attention to Coach Monty Williams, for being a man that garnered considerable public attention for his passionate expression of faith both on and off the court. The researcher attempts to create theoretical dialogue that draw from Black studies, post-colonial studies and the sociology of sport to interrogate a particular belief that Williams has, “the essence of my coaching is to serve.” The researcher attempts to examine the nature of faith based coaching philosophy that Coach Williams ascribes to as a way to foster positive relationships with his players. More importantly, the researcher intersects Coach Williams idea of faith based coaching to relationship.
Strengths of Article
· Relevance to today’s societal structure
· Relationality as it pertains to athletes
· Historical perspective highlighting social injustices as a means to address issues in sport
· Athlete’s voice
Areas of Improvement
l Data collection
l Abstract written very vague
l Method
l Coach’s spiritual philosophy vs. social injustice
l Gender to be considered in future research
Recommend that this article be revised and resubmitted. There was no real clarity as to exactly what the researcher wanted the reader to gain. Several mentions of former athletes as it pertained to their religious affiliations but never connecting to the intent of the article. The intent of the article was to highlight how Coach Monty Williams connect with his athletes and build relationships as oppose to other athletes taking social stances because of their religious affiliations.
Author Response
Thank you so much for your feedback. First, I want to assure you that I have read and reread the paper to address your concern on the need to modify language and style. I believe caught and fixed each error and typo.
Regarding abstract -
If you permit, I paraphrased some of your feedback to help build out the abstract and provide the audience with a clearer sense of what I am doing. The way you introduced my paper was very helpful and clarifying for myself.
Regarding data collection -
In my method section (now entitled Inviting Humanistic Processes into the Study of Race, Religion, and Sport) I have tried to delineate my process for gathering relevant material for the paper and the "loose archive" I have attempted to build. Ultimately, I wanted to paper to be an opportunity to be theoretically creative but not to the point where it is lacking sophistication, evidence, or empiricism. I discuss the web material I engaged with, my search engine strategy, as well as encourage scholarship to lean into creative pursuit amid the lack of formalized academic writing on a particular figure. I hope you find this articulation more sufficient.
Regarding Coaching Philosophy and Social (In)Justice
I deeply appreciate this point. I have tried to add a transition or two (primarily through clearing the Abdul Rauf example) on how race and justice for the current examination of Monty Williams. I would, however, somewhat disagree that Williams does not take oppositional social stance due to his religious affiliation. I think the point I would like to make (and hopefully it is clearer now after this revision) is that Williams cannot and should not be easily absorbed easily into the framework of "faithful coach," particularly when we think about the context and meaning of the word service. Through Williams, I hope to encourage a thoughtful meditation on the specificities of language and the context under which coaching as service is formed and articled (see the end of death inscribed on the court). I hope this is clarifying.
Regarding Conclusion
In my conclusion, I discuss a possible direction for future studies and include gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, geography, and more. I also hope my conclusion has provided a clearer sense of what I hope the audience can gain from reading my paper.
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript! This is a well-written and interesting paper. I have made some suggestions that may strengthen/clarify your argument.
Introduction:
• Line 32: This is the first time relationality is mentioned in the manuscript. As this is a key concept in your essay, take a moment to describe how you are defining relationality.
• Line 38-39: I may also take a moment to describe how you are defining faith in your argument.
• Overall, this is well-written and leads into your purpose. However, to strengthen the introduction, please provide the conceptual definitions of the key concepts you are exploring.
Method:
• I appreciate where you are going with your methodology section! This needs to be more specific. How exactly did you engage with the digital sphere for this paper? What digital source material did you use?
Histories of Faith in Basketball:
• This is an interesting section.
• I see where you are going between the paragraph that ends on 150 and the paragraph that begins on 151, but I think a stronger transition is needed to go from the discussion of racism to the connection between sport performance and faith. As it reads now, it seems a bit disjointed.
• As you begin to discuss the blending of the public into the private (and vice versa), there may be an opportunity to discuss post-secularism (i.e., Scholes & Sassower, 2014).
Death Inscribed on the Court:
• This is well written and provides some interesting history. You make good points about death/fatality. However, I would summarize/return to those arguments in the final paragraph of the section, so the focus on death does not get lost (as the section header suggests death is the focus of the section).
• Quick note—you seem to switch between religion and faith a bit in this section. Another reason I would suggest defining the difference somewhere earlier on in the paper.
Returning to Monty Williams: Coaching Praxis, Ethics, and Relationality:
• This is well-written and thought out. A few things to consider…
o There has been recent work on the “holistic care” of athletes that considers spiritual health as part of coaching praxis at a very practical level (i.e., Waller et al., 2016; Beasley et al., 2022). This may be worth a mention, as this theoretical discussion is playing out in the practical literature as well.
o You are suggesting an interesting take on relationality. I think you could strengthen the concluding paragraph of this section with a very clear operationalization of “relationality” in the context of faith.
Conclusion
• Line 391: “sacred”” appears to be out of place.
• I might argue sport is not a secular activity for many of the reasons you bring up. Further clarify this.
Author Response
Thank you so much for your incredibly thoughtful feedback. First, I want to assure you that I have read and reread the paper and attempt to fix each error and typo. (sacred was a typo and thank you for catching that!)
Regarding Introduction -
I have included some work on Bourdieu and relationality as well as a clearer definition of what I mean when I deploy the term faith to help strengthen the introduction.
Regarding Method -
In my method section (now entitled Inviting Humanistic Processes into the Study of Race, Religion, and Sport) I have tried to delineate my process for gathering relevant material for the paper and the "loose archive" I have attempted to build. Ultimately, I wanted to paper to be an opportunity to be theoretically creative but not to the point where it is lacking sophistication, evidence, or empiricism. I discuss the web material I engaged with, my search engine strategy, as well as encourage scholarship to lean into creative pursuit amid the lack of formalized academic writing on a particular figure. I hope you find this articulation more sufficient.
Regarding Histories of Faith in Basketball
I have included the recommended reading from Scholes and Sassower. It was great transition/connective tissue for the paper. Thank you for that recommendation!
Death Inscribed on the Court
I deeply appreciate this point. I have tried to add a transition or two (primarily through clearing the Abdul Rauf example) on how race and justice is relevant for the current examination of Monty Williams. To conclude the section, I also attempt to connect the notion of inheritance to life and death and how the specifics of discourse become insisted, imposed, and inscribed repeatedly. I hope this is clarifying. I also included a definition of faith in the introduction so hopefully that does some work as well.
Monty Williams + Conclusion
The literature on holistic care was very interesting. Thank you for that excellent recommendation. I have included it into this paper and as well as directly deploy you language around the operationalization of relationality. I also did some re-organizing of my conclusion to help to clarify sport as a nonsecular activity. I hope you find this sufficient.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The article still needs to separate the social justice context from the pedagogy and values of Coach Monty Wiilliams and his team building and organizational skills. The references to athletes such as Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Abdul-Rauf seems over extended. While Chris Paul was involved in the 2016 ESPY's protest with (James, Wade, and Anthony), there appears to be no link made how the article being tied to Coach Monty's leadership and values from a religious perspective and the point(s) the paper attempts to make. Coach Monty has been a great coach for the Suns the past few years and it seems that the success of the team chemistry, wins and organizational culture should be tied to his religious beliefs versus the social justice linkages that seems overextended in the paper. The paper has great potential to make a contribution to the special issue, it just needs to hone in on its thesis and theory (in my view).
Author Response
I deeply appreciate the feedback on the need to distinguish the social justice context from the pedagogical value of faith. First, to address to concern on adequate citation, I have looked to engaged with the following:
Arnold, Rachel, Sam Collington, Hannah Manley, Samuel Rees, James Soanes, and Matthew Williams. “The Team Behind the Team: Exploring the Organizational Stressor Experiences of Sport Science and Management Staff in Elite Sport." Journal of Applied Sport Psychology. 31 (2019): 7-26.
Wagstaff, Christopher. "Taking Stock of Organizational Psychology in Sport." Journal of Applied Sport Psychology. 31 (2019): 1-6.
Wagstaff, Christopher. "Organizational Psychology in Sport: An Introduction." In The Organizational Psychology of Sport. Routledge, 2016.
Womack, Mari. "Why Athletes Need Ritual: A Study of Magic Among Professional Athletes." Sport and Religion. (1992): 191-202.
From here, I looked to build in a point that for Williams, faith is not merely a personal value but a part of his everyday organizational life as a coach; it is a pedagogical orientation that has been stated as critical for both team building and creating a welcoming organizational culture.
In the section on Histories of Faith in Basketball, I added the following:
However, when considering both Maya Moore and Amar’e Stoudemire, religiosity was not solely limited to a social justice context; it was also a performance enhancement technique and foundational component to their professional decision-making. Instead of maintaining a social fixation on talent, their sustained success and well-being — the experience of thriving— in elite sport has predicated on looking beyond physical prowess and embodied competence. Similarly, for Monty Williams, faith is more than a personal endeavor. It is an organizational intervention. By intertwining faith with team building and leadership, Williams and more have drawn attention to the wealth of interpersonal, group, and organizational processes that effectively shape performance and well-being, actively dispelling what Christopher Wagstaff (2017) termed the “myth of individualism in sport” — the notion that sporting success or failure is largely determined by a combination of individual effort and ability. In short, recurrent successes in elite sport is not entirely dependent on individual performance but rather how people build and maintain relationship within a systematic collective of sociality or as Rachel Arnold et al. (2019) noted, their interest in the “team behind the team.”
At the same time, another important emergence in the field of organizational sport psychology is that a sport organization is more than a systematized collective focused on athletic success. As Christopher Wagstaff (2018) further noted, a sport organization has the potential to develop, maintain, and promote a far reaching sense of social responsibility and more recently, many have considered sport organizational behavior to be a productive model for understanding the management of institutional injustice. Against the backdrop of Donald Sterling (former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers) and Robert Sarver (current owner of the Phoenix Suns) — arguably the two most recent, high profile controversies concerning racism and sexism in NBA ownership — the sporting workplace has not been marked as a place laden with social and cultural hegemony but it has also brought attention to policy processes and institutional governance within elite sport organization. In professional basketball, we have seen faith used to not only condemn injustice but facilitate institutional continuity. For Monty Williams, faith has been implicated as part of the everyday organizational life of a coach. “Whether it is winning or losing or getting a contract or not getting signed by a team and all the in-between, my faith is something to hold onto,” Williams said. (Storm 2021).
In the section on Relationality, I revised for it to read in the following way:
Since arriving in Phoenix, Williams noted the team has widely embraced his coaching philosophy. “It has served us well” (Druin 2022). In charge of assembling the talent allotted to him and making the right call on the court, Williams also took home the NBA Coach of the Year honor for the 2021-2022 season. When current player, Devin Booker, sat down with USA Today and spoke on his relationship with Coach Williams and the honor received, he said, “[…] He is a real one. He is one of those people that when you are talking to him, he is looking you directly in your eye and you feel everything that he said. It is much bigger than basketball […] all the basketball stuff is a bonus. We just share a common interest or common love for the game […]” (Druin 2022). Service, then, is not only a commitment to the player but special attention to one-on-one interaction. To serve is to listen and share.
To conclude, I would like to ponder on the sense of deep relation experienced and described by Devin Booker. The genuine care ascribed to Monty Williams as a coach reminded me of the late bell hooks. Teaching, she explained, can happen anywhere, anytime (hooks 2014). For hooks, the true challenge is allowing ourselves space to cultivate a habit of being that constantly expresses an awareness that knowledge should be disseminated and shared widely. However, the extent to which it is made available and accessible is dependent on the nature of our political commitment (hooks 1990). In the case of Williams, his commitment to faith is relatively undeniable. At the same time, it has proven to be quite successful. And so, on some level, Williams is a tangible example of how to effectively incorporate religion into elite sport organizational culture. Roughly seventy-five percent of those playing in the NBA identify as Black but unfortunately, head coaching and front office management have long trailed behind that number, even as the league became predominantly Black. Frequently, one would hear that a Black coach was not the right fit or lacked the right kind of experience. Though Williams already held professional coaching experience, it is worth noting that his faith-based coaching philosophy has been widely embraced by his team and the league. As fellow NBA coach Alvin Gentry said, “I really admire Monty and what he has done what he has established […] You can see that they play for him and I think that is true of a lot of the younger Black coaches that have been given an opportunity. You can see the result of their labor and what they have accomplished when given that opportunity” (Rankin 2022).
I hope these revisions are sufficient. I would surely welcome another round of revisions of necessary.
