What Does It Mean to Be Accountable in Sports?

In summer of 2023, Scotland’s Josh Kerr won the 1500-meter run at the Track and Field World Championships, held in Budapest. Kerr was not the pre-race favorite, but he knew that he was capable of winning. So, he spent the year leading up to the event thinking and acting like a champion.[1] When the time came to race, Kerr positioned himself in the right spot with 200 meters to go, and blew past rival, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, for the win.

“It’s been like fight camp,” Kerr noted, regarding his preparations for Budapest.[2] Among the changes he made leading up to the event, Kerr began working with a sports psychologist and a nutritionist. He prioritized sleep.[3] And he and his coach refined their training decisions. Kerr’s accountability paid off in a big way—with a World Championships gold medal.

What is accountability?

Accountability is an excellence of answerability. It is a relational virtue,[4] or an excellence that concerns two or more parties. It involves taking responsibility for what one ought and holding fast to commitments.[5]

Accountability impacts many areas of life, and it is a central feature of relationships. Many (if not all[6]) of our moral obligations are grounded in accountability. For example, I may owe prompt communication to a boss, and help around the house to my parents, by dint of our relationships. My task is to adequately discern which claims and expectations placed on me, by the people in my life, are legitimate.[7] The accountable person navigates these claims with excellence.

Accountability is critically important in the athletic context, where athletes are often answerable to coaches and teams. Moreover, growing up in a sport is a learned process of taking more ownership for one’s own training—becoming more accountable.

So, what does it mean to be accountable in sports? Here are a few guidelines.

1. Claim your wins and your losses.

There is a pattern I often see among parents and coaches of athletes in youth sports. They praise successes and explain away failures. For example, they commend a runner for courage when they hit a big goal. But when a runner performs poorly, they attribute the loss to high winds or a busy week at school. They provide agential reasons for successes and situational reasons for failures.

It is obvious why they do so. This is a human response to another’s disappointment. But, strictly speaking, agential and situational factors feature in both our successes and our failures.

Accountability means being answerable for our actions. Sports can provide practice in discerning, with honesty, what is within our control, so we can improve in these respects. Or it can provide the opposite—practice in explaining away our failures. The latter is a recipe for becoming an unaccountable person.[8]

2. Accountability is not blind trust.

A coach-athlete relationship should never involve uncritical dependency, at any stage of coaching. It should preserve an athlete’s agency in decision-making, and it should grow more collaborative as the athlete matures. Coaching should also prioritize the flourishing of the athlete.

That said, an athlete may be in a situation in which they feel powerless. Young athletes may not know how to advocate for themselves, or they might fail to recognize signs of danger. For these reasons, there should be checks in place to protect athletes from misuses of power and from other questionable actions on the part of the coach. For young athletes, parents should pay close attention.

3. Order your accountability relationships correctly.

Part of being an accountable person is knowing to whom we should answer, and when. For example, a boss, a coach, and your children may all make a claim on your time on a Saturday morning. Maybe you are asked to work extra hours, complete a training session, and cheer at your kid’s soccer game. It is important to recognize which relationship is the most important, and to whom you ought to answer. Otherwise, you will probably just defer to whomever is the loudest or most demanding. That is not accountability; it is spinelessness.[9]

Sport and Competition Essential Reads

When Your Worth Is Based on Your Medals

In the Slow Zone: When Time Expands for Athletes

4. Leave room for growth.

Accountability is a developmental concept. When we are young, we are often poorly positioned to act for our own good because we lack training knowledge and the practical wisdom that comes with experience. We rely on coaches to guide us, and they hold us accountable in our formation as athletes.

But, as we grow, we are better positioned to choose well for ourselves. We know our bodies better, we know what training works for us, and we know what is important to us. Ideally, a coach will develop an athlete’s freedom, inviting the athlete to rationally participate in her own formation, such that she can choose well for herself.

Of course, what I have just described will work better in certain sports than in others. For example, team sports such as soccer and football, may require more directive coaching throughout, for the sake of directing the group and adjudicating disputes among players.

But, certainly, how a coach interacts with players should change as the players mature. In general, there should be more collaboration and delegation, and less micromanagement.