While everyone else has brought up some excellent points ( often right on top of their heads ), bottom line is that THIS league was created to be competative. If you want the experience of running around and playing with your mates in a non-competative setting, you DO NOT PLAY IN A COMPETATIVE LEAGUE.
If I had been the coach, and Mr. Prick had suggested mixing up the teams, I would have asked him “Do you forefit?” If he said yes, I would have loaded my girls up on the bus and left. Why, you ask?
BECAUSE IT WAS A COMPETATIVE LEAGUE! THAT’S WHAT THE GIRLS ARE THERE FOR!
Didn’t the OP mention the girls agreed to the mixed game? Couldn’t the coach have told “Mr. Prick” that her team had looked forward to the game and would like to play together?
grienspace, your kid is lucky to have two coaches who encourage her. More importantly, your kid is lucky to have a real advocate in her dad, a parent who relates to her petty but true disapointments in life.
The “girls” did not agree–their coach agreed for them, reluctantly. I can see where an Eastern European lady would have felt intimidated by an American male, and would have given a reluctant go-ahead.
Andros, I admit, you have the better speech. Wordier, but better.
** I have had limited experience with junior high volleyball, as my daughter does cross-country, so maybe Grienspace would care to address this, but I believe that junior high and high school volleyball does not allow substitutions the way basketball does, except for injury. In school volleyball games, players rotate, taking turns as server, and if there are too many players to legally fit on the court, players are rotated in and out, beginning with the server position. And I believe the rule is that “all team members must play”, so you don’t have benchwarmers to begin with. Eventually everybody gets rotated in and plays.
So Coach wouldn’t be allowed to simply pull a player who had screwed up twice and plug another player into her position. He’d have to wait until Miss Star Player had finished her turn as server and then put in someone else. And then Miss Star Player would come up for another turn as the game went on, and would have a chance to redeem herself…
So unless Grienspace has some other information, I believe that your point is moot.
However you don’t see the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins mixing teams during the regular season around Thanksgiving, do you? Your analogy just doesn’t work. In an all star game players from different clubs are expected to get together. Once they have the teams down you don’t see them mixing things up.
DDG, the girls should strive to be more like Mia, and try their best anyway. They should at least be told that it’s unsportsmanlike to not try during a game, they should not be supported for acting like they did. **
[/QUOTE]
I guess not, they should have just been good sports and made the best of the situation. However it was unsportsman like to mix the teams because someone was losing badly.
You must be referring to my post with your “T-ball” comment, since I think I’m the only person in the thread who’s brought up tee-ball. If that’s the case, get your facts straight. I never said “treat the little darlings as if they were five-year-old T-ball players.” I said it was possible for kids to play a game, be competitive, and still have fun – in short, to have the best of all worlds mentioned in the thread. The tee-ball anecdote was for illustrative purposes only.
What DDG said regarding volleyball. But to satisfy your curiosity, we can talk about my daughter’s soccer coach.
I’ve already pointed out that all the teamplayers have significant time on the field. No bench girls. From time to time the coach will make a specific substitution for the purpose of talking to a player.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the coach yank a player specifically for a mistake to punish them. That is why I don’t like your option 3 either.
But every time Little grienspace is off, I am anxious for her return. If I had to chose, I’d rather see her play for the full 80 minutes and have her team lose, than watch her play only a quarter of the time and have her team win. Do you understand me a little clearer now?
By the way, I liked those speeches guys. Mine was facetious you know.
I’ve never been particularly good in sports except for one time in 9th grade when gym class was playing volleyball with me serving and the rest of the team was making good plays. Normally I’d just be in the way. Here we have grienspacette’s team split up and recombined with the other team, one of which is clearly not as skilled. Seems to me that with this combination, grienspacette and the rest of her team had difficulty maintaining the level of play that they would have without the less skilled girls in the way. The less skilled girls most likely realized that they were in the way, which lead to them not performing up to par either. So, we have two teams playing poorly and not having any fun. In fact, I think the only one that had fun during the second game was Coach Prick because he got his way. Given these circumstances, grienspacette’s eye rolling was perfectly understandable.
Sauron- big whoops here. My comment was not meant to refer to your T-ball story at all, but I see how that would seem to be implied. Sorry for the confusion.
My comment was instead directed to those who thought that the team-mixing described in the OP was the compassionate solution to the problem, while I feel that it was simply a further humiliation to kids of that age. Not an age appropriate solution.
As far as all-star games go- my son is a good baseball player (he’s a catcher). He makes the all-star team every year. The all-star team, of course has the most skilled players in the league, but the quality of play is often not as good as in the regular games, because the players don’t know each other. I don’t mean that they don’t know each other’s names or that they don’t hang out together. They haven’t played together enough to anticipate their teammates’ reactions.On his regular season team, my son knew whether the second or third baseman would anticipate a throw from home, and decided whether to throw or not based on that knowledge.In an all-star game he doesn’t have that knowledge, and has to either take a chance on throwing to someone who’s not expecting it and won’t catch it or play it safe and not throw. And that may be part of the reason for the lackluster play in the second,“mixed” game- inexperience playing together.
