I cannot recall exactly when I first had the realisation that the validation derived by performers within the virtual realm might have the power to displace their drive to achieve in real world competition, but it was certainly within the past decade. These suspicions have only been strengthened over the recent period from observing how performers (including high profile athletes) are choosing to conduct themselves online and in person. What is also becoming all the more apparent is the tension between two realms. The behaviours that are cultivated and encouraged in social media land are in many ways contrary to what is required to compete successfully against real life competitors and navigate real world challenges in the sport. Chasing social media fame is proving somewhat incompatible with pursuing real world goals in sport. Unregulated social media use in itself is also emerging as a threat to the performance and wellbeing of the individual, serving to make performers more fragile and exposing vulnerabilities. The rapid rise of these new features of performing in the digital era has caught many of us off guard, such that coaches, support staff and administrators are still grappling with what to do to manage and regulate performers’ online activities. Certainly we have been slow to recognise the dangers and to date we have largely failed to come up with effective countermeasures to mitigate the potential harms.

Observers have noted that the spirit of the age is trending towards safetyism, or the assertion that challenging situations and discomfiting experiences are something we should seek to protect young people from. Recent evidence suggests this trend is continuing apace; indeed the calls for such protections are coming from young people themselves - or at least from a vocal minority who claim to represent different sections of the population. Moreover these requests are often granted with some enthusiasm by increasingly indulgent institutions. At the very least trigger warnings are deemed necessary for anything that has the potential to cause upset or offend increasingly delicate sensibilities - unless of course the term ‘trigger warning’ is itself found to be too triggering for the individuals concerned.

Against this societal backdrop it was somewhat inevitable that those operating in the realms of coaching and performance sport might start running into issues. Perhaps the closest cousin of coaching is teaching. Those of us in the coaching profession would therefore do well to heed the alarming ideological shift in higher education (and education in general) notably in North America. There is a storm on the horizon.