Miesha Tate stands by her stance on fighters dating coaches

You see it a fair bit in MMA, fighters dating coaches. There are good examples and there bad examples of this dynamic and unfortunately for Miesha Tate she experienced a bad example in Bryan Caraway. Tate is concerned that Aspen Ladd, who dates coach Jim West, may also draw the same straw further down the line. Tate sat down to talk with the MMA Hour ahead of her fight with Ketlen Vieira at UFC Vegas 43 this Saturday.

Aspen Ladd’s coach/boyfriend has a way of cornering that has the MMA community divided, some think it is too extreme and some fans think its normal. Miesha Tate is the former:

“People think that I’m crazy because they look at it and say, ‘Well the coach needed to be the coach, and he needed to be hard on her, and he needed to tell her the truth. Yeah, you’re right, but there’s a difference between motivating and there’s a difference between giving her the body language, just the little two-finger shove on her shoulder to kind of get her to focus on him — you don’t understand when you break that down, exactly what that means and what’s going on in their relationship.

“People just see this one little glimpse, and I’m looking at this from someone who’s been on the outside in the big picture, and I think she failed to show up more so probably due to outside factors than what you saw in the fight. It’s hard for people to understand that unless you’ve been there.”

The power a head coach has over a fighter can be problematic according to Tate and it is not uncommon to see coaches and fighters getting together; Pat Barry/Rose Namajunas, Andrea Lee/Donny Aaron, and Antonina Shevchenko/Pavel Fedotov and so on.

“Absolutely, especially your lead coach,” she said. “I would absolutely say you don’t want that, and that’s where Johnny and I differ very much from what I was used to in that, yes, he’s in my corner, he’s a part of my camps, he does teach me things sometimes, but I see us as equals, and I think he recognizes that, too. Sometimes, I show him things. We don’t have someone who’s in charge of the other one — we are just there to support each other, because it’s difficult when someone always gets to be the boss of you, and that translates over into the personal life, too, where you just start to feel like you lose yourself. Because where do you draw the line? Where’s the difference?

“If somebody always gets to be the boss of you, and it’s 24-7, pretty soon you’re swallowed up in that, especially if you’re not with the right person to give you that guidance. It’s a very tricky thing to do. I don’t think very many people are able to make a head coach relationship [work] — and it’s always women. It’s always women that end up dating their head coach. We haven’t really seen it in reverse, so I’m not sure what that would look like in the reverse, but I can speak from my situation that, for the most part, it was detrimental, and the longer that it went, it was detrimental.”

Tate does not want to speak in absolutes and say that all relationships between coaches and fighters are bad. John Wood and Joanne Calderwood (Mrs. Calderwood-Wood?) are an example of a good coach/fighter couple, or Paige VanZant and Austin Vanderford.

But Tate wants there to be a discussion over the power dynamics that develop in the fighter/coach relationship, especially when there is an age gap. There is a large age gap between Ladd and West.

“It is, from my experience, generally problematic when a female fighter, especially younger, starts dating a coach,” she said. “The more the age difference, the more they become, sort of, hooks in, claws deep, and they start to feel like they can rule your life. And that can happen even outside of fighting, but when you add that kind of dynamic to it as well, it can just be such an ugly situation. So I think it’s something we should definitely have conversations about, make people a little more aware that it doesn’t have to be that way.

“But a lot of times, I feel like women gravitate toward a male figure that’s in their life consistently and trying to help them. But once it becomes a relationship, things become so entangled and so intertwined, and it’s very difficult not only to separate your personal life from when you go into the gym, but the gym from when you go home. That was my biggest problem was that the coach always came home. I lost the significant other, if you will, and it just became this mental game — it was 24/7.”

Miesha dated her own coach, Bryan Caraway, for the best part of a decade until the pair went their separate ways in 2017. Caraway was charged with a whole host of crimes in 2018, including attempted theft of Miesha Tate’s ATV. Tate is now happily engaged to teammate Johnny Nunez, with whom she has two kids.

“I can relate to the situation that she’s in, and that’s exactly how I feel,” she said. “I think that in a few years, she’ll probably come out and say, ‘Yeah, I was in the thick of it. I wasn’t ready to talk about it then, but here in hindsight, here’s the truth.’”

This is the fight that had the community divided, a fight that Aspen lost:

Before that Jim West did the same thing and it resulted in one of the best performances of Aspen’s career:

You be the judge and tell us what you think, is it just a professional thing or does it run deeper than that? There are numerous cases of bullying behaviour in MMA relationships and Miesha Tate is convinced about this particular relationship. Of course, Aspen’s inability to make weight is also a major cause for concern, is she pushing herself or is she being pushed? Only time will tell.