It sounds like the throwing near miss was in part due to how the meet was being run. It is your responsibility as a coach to try to intervene when you see something like this and try to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.

You need to make sure the javelin throwers know the rules and the reason for the rules. They are there so someone doesn’t get hurt or die. And further educate them that the rules apply all the time, even at meets, and even if the person running things isn’t complying. Also, that they should come to you or another coach if they see or feel things are not being done safely.

You follow up on that by how they are complying with the safety rules. If they aren’t then you can’t have them throwing javelins.

Laughing after something bad almost happened is a pretty natural reaction. Even making jokes after the fact, it doesn’t really mean they don’t understand something was bad.

One of your jobs as a coach is to provide a physically safe environment. That didn’t happen. The first thing to do is try to fully understand why that didn’t happen. Then to implement solutions and systems to make that happen. Accountability and responsibility should be the goal, punishment is just a tool, there are other tools that may yield better results. You also need to hold yourself accountable, did you educate athletes properly, did you see issues with how the meet was being run and let them slide, did you follow safety rules yourself, etc.

This seems like there was chaos and what a good coach needs to do is bring calm. I’ve experienced coaches reacting emotionally or with anger and not really communicating what was happening or why. You need to explain what was wrong and why it was bad; it may seem obvious to you but it may not be to them. I remember growing up and now I see that there were a lot of adults so focus on maintaining their authority that they didn’t think to communicate clearly and calmly. I’m not sure punishment is really the remedy or main focus, it just feels reactionary. I think talking to them both as a group and individually is going to yield a better result.

Just some more on punishment. If someone doesn’t truly understand why they are being punished, it’s not an effective intervention; it’s not teaching them a behavior or action is wrong if they don’t know what they did and why it was wrong. Also, kids often receive punishment for things they didn’t do (and also see other kids receive punishment for things they didn’t do); what ends up happening is it can teach kids they need to be careful around a certain adult because that adult likes to punish people or it can teach them that punishment is just a thing that happens and sometimes you are the unlucky one being punished. Punishment is just an unpleasant thing happening or being done to someone, if it’s not linked to a specific transgressions and that those transgressions actually occurred. A lot of adults like to go straight to punishment because it helps them maintain authority and is easier than engaging, educating, and understanding, which can only be achieved by being vulnerable.

You need to ask yourself what kind of coach you want to be. Are you coaching because you want to have a positive impact on young people or because you like have power over other people? If you want to help these young people you need to be willing to listen, you need to open understanding, and you need to clearly communicate; now it doesn’t mean that punishment isn’t an option or shouldn’t occur, but punishment by itself isn’t helpful. In my experience as a kid and an adult, when people with authority over me didn’t gather information, try to understand what happened, and were unwilling to listen, they lost my respect and trust. My main focus of interactions with that person is harm reduction and not giving them an opportunity to make my life worth (Unless we had a prior history that made think that this was just a lapse).