coach2709,
The good thing about all this is that while those bad things do happen, thankfully they don’t happen very often. What’s sad is, when you’re in the middle of something like that as a coach, player, or parent, it can be all consuming. It would be great if everyone could just get together and talk these things out without any animosity, but I’ve found out more than once that when family members get into a “protective” mode, deserved or not, everything goes downhill at avalanche speed. Hopefully the coach doesn’t get into a “protective” mode too because that just makes things all the worse.
The real sadness is, it’s seldom the player making the problem worse, but he’s always the one who suffers the most.