7 thoughts on “January 28, 2023: Civic Duty”

    2. I almost missed it. This is cool. I’ll add it to the daily challenges. This list is getting up there, though.

  2. Follow up to the previous conversation re: winning.

    I'm at another kids basketball tournament today. Last game I ended up sitting behind the parents of the student who was inarguably the best player on the court. He played for the other team. He was also the biggest whiner I've seen in a very long time.

    I made comments throughout the game, discussing with other parents on our team. We also fairly criticized the ball hog on our team, so it was pretty even handed.

    When I realized the people sitting in front were with the kid, the lady in front if me turned around and wondered if I would apologize. I declined, complimented her son's basketball skill, but told her I stood by my comments on attitude. She did not take kindly to that. After the game I clarified that, while it's just 9 and 10 year old kids, and we don't know what struggles they have off the court, we do have to ask for better attitudes from all our athletes on the court/field/pitch/etc. She seemed to disagree.

    1. That doesn’t seem like a surprising reaction from the mom. In my limited Little League experience, it was not hard to match the kids with poor attitudes to the parents with poor attitudes.

      1. My daughter ran the local camps run by the parks department. She had to talk to a parent about behavior issues with their kid. Her response was, "She's an athlete so we encourage her to be aggressive."

        It turns out that this mom isn't allowed to watch local Little League games.

        It was a good lesson to my daughter that adults can be idiots.

      2. I guess I understand the knee jerk reaction to defend your kid, but I also know I've apologized to parents from other teams when our players have been like that. Just a simple "we're working on it," would do the trick.

Comments are closed.