Tomorrow will be the last time I coach a flag football game.
Win or lose I am out of the flag game. It’s the politics. I got into coaching because I felt I had a real knack for helping kids be successful. What I didn’t realize right away was that one kid’s success often necessitates another’s failure. I knew this intrinsically, but I didn’t actually recognize in any real way that parents are unwilling to allow their kids to fail. As a result, leagues are often unwilling to let a kid fail. We give everyone a trophy and demand equal playing time. In essence, in the event to advance a perception of success for all we are failing to award individual skill and talent, making it almost seem like a bad thing.
“Oh, that kid is really good. Maybe we should limit him.” I’m not going to go into some deep parallel about young athletes and mutants (I saw Logan today), but I will say that there is a question hanging in my mind about why we spend so much time coddling the untalented and building rules to protect them from those with talent.
I built a Speed Force for this final tournaments and over the course of the past week multiple rule changes went out limiting the kids who were able to play on the squad–decimating the squad in fact. We are left with a fraction of the players we originally trained with. The replacements are good kids, but it isn’t fair to the kids who worked from the start that they not be able to play.
That is the kind of politics I’m talking about and that is one of the reason’s that I’m out.