Of the many ways coaches and student-athletes interact, the one least comfortably discussed is that of intimate relationships between players and their coaches.

Sports Illustrated examined this secretive, complex problem in its September 10, 2001, issue. Such well-known college and professional athletes as Marion Jones, Julie Foudy and Brandi Chastain were mentioned in the article, which said that both Jones and Foudy dated their assistant coaches while competing in college. Both eventually married those coaches. Chastain married the man who was her coach at Santa Clara University.

In athletics, these unconventional romances cause as many complications for the team as for the couple. If the team is unaware of the relationship, the student-athlete involved in the affair has power to unfairly influence the coach's decision on everything from playing time to disciplinary actions to how a coach views certain players.

When teams are aware of the relationship, accusations of favoritism seep into the team's chemistry, making for a potentially volatile situation. When the relationship goes public, the participating coach's career is damaged, if not destroyed, and the student-athlete takes on a Hester Prynne quality that's impossible to shake.

A current student-athlete experienced the firing of one of her team's assistant coaches because he was secretly dating one of the players. She said it had negative ramifications for the entire team both while the affair was occurring and in its aftermath.

"The girl who was dating the coach was telling him things that were going on with the other players -- personal things that those players didn't want the coach to know about," said the student-athlete, who preferred to remain anonymous.

She said her team's cohesiveness broke down as players regularly engaged in what she said was "cattiness" and fights about favoritism toward the players who were close to the player involved.

The student-athlete thought the affair was common knowledge to the coaching staff, but she said when the affair was exposed, the assistant was fired, the player quit, and the head coach took out his anger and frustrations on the team. While it had never been clearly presented to the team before the affair that player/coach dating was prohibited, the student-athlete said, "Our coach told us it's just an unspoken rule."

That "unspoken" factor may be the source of the problem. Coaches who date their players are well aware of the damaging effects the relationship can have for all involved. And while the student-athletes who date coaches might have some idea of the potential for harm, rarely do they understand how destructive it can be to their own personal development.

Ed Etzel, psychologist and life skills coordinator at West Virginia University, said the issue links to ethics. "It's very clear this is forbidden," he said. "The issue is power. (By engaging in this) you can muddy the nature of the player/coach relationship. You can undermine trust. It creates a different set of dynamics."

Becky Ahlgren, NCAA assistant director of education outreach, said, "It is always the responsibility of the individual in power to monitor the propriety of the relationship. On the college level and younger, the welfare of the student-athlete should be the guiding force behind coaching behaviors on and off the field."

Another angle to the athlete/
coach relationship is the problem student-athletes can have if they seek to end a relationship with or want to rebuff sexual advances by their coach. Spurned coaches might go so far as to cut scholarship money and playing time for the person who refuses them.

Athletics departments tend to adopt their institutions' overall sexual harassment policies as their own. And those policies tend to address the topic of consensual sex between "individuals in inherently unequal positions."

But whether athletics departments are addressing the specific problem of a student-athlete and a coach dating is hard to determine.

A request to CHAMPS/Life Skills coordinators via the national office listserv resulted in no responses regarding specific athletics department policies about student-athlete/coach dating. The administrators who were contacted to talk about the subject were hesitant to comment.