A Hard Lesson

What is it about people that drives them to purposefully hurt someone? How do you prepare a teenager to deal with crappy people and that in life they never go away? There is always someone out there who is miserable and mean and get off on hurting people. I can honestly say that I personally have encountered people like this throughout my entire life and it never gets any easier to prepare yourself do deal with them.

So where is all this coming from? My 14 year old daughter was singled out and cut from the Freshman volleyball team. There were not enough Freshman to complete a 10 team roster, in fact there were only 9 girls who tried out and they have all been playing together since 7th grade. Most of the players, including my daughter, have also played USA volleyball with the coach that cut my daughter. The coach decided to move 1 Freshman to Varsity, 2 Freshman to Jr. Varsity, 1 Varsity to Jr. Varsity, keep 6 players on the Freshman team and cut only my daughter from the entire roster. Now for those who don’t know volleyball, there are 6 players on the court so a 6 player roster is brutal to say the least. A typical roster consists of 10 players.

We were all upset by this worst case scenario for my Freshman daughter. So now I need to help her deal with the pain and let her take in a hard lesson. In my opinion, the coach should be developing players instead of cutting them. Just for the record, in the 3 years she has run the High School program she has lost players and carries a loosing record. However, she is the coach and we all have to live her decision.

My final thoughts are that there is a whole entire world of hurt going on. War, genocide, famine, corrupt politics, poverty, greed, disease, etc… My job as a parent is to put it all into perspective and teach my daughter not to be that hurtful person who pisses everyone else off. To hold her head up high, support her friends and family, and be an uplifting person that others will want to be around. That kind of behavior is contagious and others will want to be like her and not the crappy High School coach who gets off on killing a 14 year olds self esteem.