Sorry, I thought that your daughters team game must have been a friendly too, rather than a tournament or league deal.
Honey, how come your daughter doesn’t play a sport?
She’s 11 and has never been interested in sports. She is way into music. She is a teeny little girl for her age, perhaps she feels overwhelmed by sports. I suppose either one will teach her practice and discipline though.
Probally because she/he dosen’t want a choad like you refing the events. :wally
That was a bit harsh, doncha think?
If you think “choad” is harsh… well stay in the pit a while longer. Anyway I had coaches like “Mr. Prick” AND the Fast Driving Eastern Europeian Woman… I always liked the “Mr. Prick” coaches better. Also saw many a parents like grienspace, even when they were polite they still thought they knew more than the coaches and the official refs.
Pavelka:
Get a clue. You are completely misreading Grienspace if you think you’re seeing a Foaming-At-The-Mouth “My Kid First!” Sports Parent here. All of his reactions in this thread have been IMO eminently reasonable, par for the course for a Caring Dad.
Honey:
So if it was a high school boys football team, would you say, “It’s too bad that they can’t have fun unless they can kick some ass?” Would you support a high school boys football coach who told his team, just before they ran out on the field for the big Homecoming game, “Now, get on out there, and remember–have fun”?
Girls were told for centuries that it was un-feminine to be competitive, to enjoy winning. I was taught that when you win at something, it’s an embarrassment, somehow. If you win, you have to stand there and modestly brush it aside, “Oh, no, no, it was nothing.” You weren’t allowed to leap up in the air and high-five each other. I applaud girls volleyball and basketball teams everywhere, for teaching girls that it’s okay to be competitive, to enjoy “kicking ass”.
They don’t show up for volleyball practice and stick with it through all the injuries and the heartache, just so they can “have fun” goofing around with volleyball. They stick with it because “kicking ass”–winning–is rewarding.
And belonging to a winning volleyball team is extremely rewarding.
Note: La Principessa is also quite teeny for her age, and is deeply into music, but she went out for cross-country, had a blast, and plans to go out for Track in the spring. She’s not particularly athletic, either. Cross-country in particular is a solo event, it’s just you vs. the course. “Can you do it?” Like that. I’ll wager that she learned more about discipline the first time she ran the two-mile, got halfway through it, and wondered if she’d be able to finish at all. But Coach had said, “It’s okay to walk, don’t make yourself sick,” so she trudged around the course until she didn’t feel sick anymore and then jogged the rest of the way. By the time she crossed the finish line, it was just me and Coach, but hey, that was okay, the important thing was that she finished the course.
One more person who doesn’t Get It.
You don’t have a Middle School kid, do you? This is not a game for them, Fionn. The point is not riding the bus and putting on the cool uniform. They’d play even if there were no bus ride, if they had to be chauffered around by their parents, and if there were no money for uniforms. Many girls volleyball teams do it like this. Maybe they all get together and decide on a color of polo shirt, which they all go out and buy, but that’s all.
This is deadly serious to all these 11 and 12-year-olds. This isn’t about bus rides. This is Life Or Death.
The 6th Grade girls volleyball league is frequently the tryout ground, the starting point, for pre-teen girls athletics. If you’re not tall enough for girls basketball, or fast enough for cross-country, or gymnastic enough for cheerleading, you can always go out for volleyball, where technique counts for more than size or strength. This gives many girls a niche, a Group to belong to, who otherwise wouldn’t be involved with sports at all.
Also, it looks super on your resume. Dunno how Grienspace’s middle school organizes it, but in many school districts the 6th grade is the top of the elementary school totem pole, being a Kindergarten through 6th grade school, so when those sixth graders hit the real 7th and 8th grade middle school as 7th graders, and they’re suddenly low men (girls) on the totem pole again, having been on the 6th grade volleyball team gives them an entree. They can go out for 7th grade volleyball and say, “Yeah, I played on the Rutherford Rockets last year” and suddenly they’re in, in like Flynn.
But if what they learned with the Rockets was that volleyball is just for “fun”, and they aren’t perceived by the other players as being competitive enough (“Sheesh, what’s the big deal whether we win or lose, aren’t we having fun, isn’t that the important thing?”), they’ll be shut out of the Group.
Death, in other words.
So it’s far better for them to learn in 6th grade that girls volleyball is meant to be competitive, that kicking ass and winning are Good. It isn’t meant to be Recess. Recess is for little kids.
And as any pre-teen girl will tell you, she is not a little kid any more.
Part of Mr. Prick’s job as a coach is to teach his team how to handle losing. Yes, they should have played both games as scheduled, and if his girls got their asses whipped both times, it’s his fucking job to teach them how to suck it up and move on. If he does anything less, he’s wasting their time, and his.
Attitudes like this are what spawn overzealous coaches that prevent kids from having fun (unless they happen to be on the one “kick ass … team” that “never lost a game.”) Even then, it’s no guarantee. If you’re the one kid on the undefeated team who plays like shit, but just wants to have fun, you’re going to be riding the bench at best, or singled-out and humiliated at worst (most likely both).
“Mr. Prick” apparently thought that 11-year-old girls were kids and should be having fun, not practicing so hard that they blow out every team they play.
I had the exact opposite of “Mr. Prick” as a baseball coach when I was in the third grade. I was uncoordinated and awkward in every way, but I loved playing the game. My coach, The Real Mr. Prick, saw that I wasn’t really that great early-on in practices, but it was clear that I was having fun and wanted to be there.
Not good enough. “WE GOTTA WIN!,” yells The Real Mr. Prick. This left him in a predicament. Obviously, I was the weak link in the well-molded team (of eight-year-olds). But I had to play, right? Every kid has to get in the game.
The Real Mr. Prick figured out a solution. He ordered me never to swing the bat. Ever. He depended on the fact that the opposing pitchers were, you know, eight-year-olds, and they couldn’t get it over the plate most of the time. For a solid month, all I did was walk to first base, or go down on called strikes.
Baseball was the figurative third strike. I had had similar experiences previously with soccer and basketball. I quit and never played another organized sport again. Maybe I could have been a good player. I don’t know. Nobody ever gave me the chance.
Coaches were far too focused on WINNING WINNING WINNING to ever give a fuck about a kid who mostly just struck out (in practice, anyway), dropped fly balls, and usually tripped in the sand when attempting to slide into a base.
I’m in my mid twenties, so I wasn’t in middle school all that long ago. I remember what it’s like. I remember that the above, and most of the verbiage that precedes and follows it, is unadulterated malarky.
Yes, it’s great to win and kick ass. I think these are useful lessons to impart to children in a difficult, competitive world. But winning and losing as “Life or Death” in the cosmically insignificant world of sixth grade volleyball is both sick and absurd.
Furthermore, drawing a link between this clearly world-saving activity and social promotion is dubious at best. You distrust your daughter’s own social skills so much that you feel she has to be on a winning team to be “in”? What exactly is the value of being “in”?
If volleyball is not “for fun,” then good lord, why does anyone play it?
I don’t disagree that competition is fun and healthy. But your post seems to indicate the kind of extreme mache-mania that breeds unhealthy pressure, resentment, and disappointment.
DDG, you are absolutely right in that I “don’t get it”. I can tell that I don’t because, the above example sounds to me like it’d be a refreshing change.
All sportspeople, at all levels, should have that axiom in mind.
I’m 22. I don’t have a junior high kid, but I was one myself about ten years ago. I would hope coaches and parents would do what they could to counter the Life Or Death bullshit. It’s a game. It may be fun and it may feel great to win and you get to belong to a team and all that fun stuff, but it’s a game. When I didn’t make the 7th grade volleyball team, my parents said “If you really want to play, you can work harder, but this won’t matter down the road.”
I played tennis. Tennis is a mixture of kids who’ve been playing for years, competing in tournaments and attending clinics, who weild raquets costing hundreds of dollars, and kids who’ve signed up for the junior high team on a whim and took their dad’s dusty old racket out of closet. It’s easy to get a perspective on the relative importance of the game in the grand scheme of things when you’re facing an opponent who’s never been taught to serve properly.
[snip volleyball tryout details and resume stuff]
In my school district, sixth graders were relegated to playing sports in gym class. This let coaches get a look at potential players, but they also held a bizaare thing they called “tryouts” before they picked the seventh grade teams. If a player had been on a “just for fun” team but had potential, it would have come out in one or both places.
Death, in other words.
Well, fuck me, I musta died back in seventh grade. And then, of course, come back to life when it was time to play tennis.
Out of curiosity, what do you think this Life or Death attitude does to the kids who don’t make that first cut? I’m sure La Principessa is a nice kid who doesn’t rub this in their faces, but what about the rest of the Elect Who Belong?
I remember girls in junior high sobbing in restrooms because boys they liked didn’t like them back. Clearly, they felt it was a Life or Death matter for Johnny Whoever to like them. Should this attitude have been flattered as well?
**
Then she can learn some perspective like a grown-up.
neutron star, all the player’s playtime is equal on the volleyball team. Every serve rotation results in the player at the end of the bench to slap a five to the outgoing server and take her place beside the new server. That is the practice of the league and an excellent one IMHO.
On my daughter’s soccer rep team, I don’t think any one sits out for more than 20 minutes in an 80 minute game.
DDG says it way better than I can, but, guys, come on, its about TEAM SPIRIT. Even a losing team that tries its best but gets whomped can leave the game feeling the experience was worth the effort. If they don’t, then the coach isn’t doing his/her job.
All right, then, sign me up as another person who doesn’t “get it.” I had thought the purpose of sports and other extracurriculars was to “have fun.” Apparently not.
Nice. And those girls or boys that just want to have fun? Or, worse yet, don’t enjoy sports? They get automatically ostracized by the Group, right? I realize that this type of behaviour happens in middle schools all over, but I don’t think adults ought to be encouraging that way of thinking.
I can’t get over how you and other’s miss the point. Its not winning and losing as Life and Death, its being part of a GROUP, a TEAM, or not, from the perspective of a 12 year old.
You know, there is a middle ground between “WIN AT ALL COSTS” and “Let’s just have fun and not keep track of who is winning.” It is not an either-or situation.
Team sports are competitive by nature. That’s the whole fucking point. That’s what makes sports interesting. Even the kids playing pick-up basketballs game in the park on Saturdays keep score.
A little competition is good for a kid. Learning how to win gracefully is good for a kid. Learning how to lose gracefully is good for a kid. Learning teamwork is good for a kid.
Kids can’t learn comradery if their so-called team is so meaningless that it can be mixed with another for so apparent reason. And praising a kid for a half-assed play teaches the kid that she will get the same result no matter what she does.
As an example I understand better: Drama. (I only played sports in elementary and junior high and quit once I was a freshman in high school).
In the church I used to attend, pretty much everyone sang a solo in the Christmas/late spring cantatas, and many people had at least a 1 or 2 line part. Those better at acting ended up with bigger parts.
Once I hit high school theatre, though, that’s where it became competitive. You’re expected to know how to act, sing, dance…if you can’t do those things, you won’t get a huge part.
Now, about 80 people participated in theatre at my high school. Those who knew they could not act, sing, or dance, were happy to be relegated to bit parts or the chorus. Parts were assigned according to ability. Those who didn’t like it would leave the department.
Same with sports. Once you’ve learned how to play, in elementary or junior high, you can have fun with it. But you’re not going to have fun in high school or college if you’re not good, and they expect you to be good once you get there.
In that case, you have to figure out that maybe volleyball, or theatre, or music, or whatever really isn’t for you and move on to an area in which you have greater talent.
How is “being part of a TEAM” mutually exclusive from just having fun and playing the game?
Why not? Hell, we switched teams all the time in gym class, and we still enjoyed competitive play. There is a distinguishable difference between learning how to play on a team and with a particular team. The first has intrinsic value, the second does not, and I see no reason to believe that they are inextricable linked.
I think you can do both, some people can be assholes, and there is nothing you can do, but you have to make the mental choice to learn what you can from the experience, and if it is nothing more than learning how to enjoy playing ball with less talented players, then so be it.
I don’t understand how this could be fun either, especially when the players thought they were going to play as a team…
I am a pretty good volleyball player, nothing pro/uni worthy but I was probably in the top 5 to 10 people in my high school league, and one of the top players in my high school. However, aside from two other players the rest of the team was sorely lacking in skill, and we lost a lot of games. I respect the need to learn how to lose, but to have the same fucking lesson week after week can get pretty demoralizing. Luckily my high school had a great basketball program, and I was part of a great volleyball program outside of school.