A Responsible Sports Fan suggested the following Scenario Question:
During summer practice, my daughter was told that she needed to attend all practices because she was going to be the setter of her High School Varsity Team. She attended every practice, but supposedly during a weekend tournament, my daughter made two setting mistakes and she was pulled without the coach ever saying anything to her. She assumed that after that game, she would return to the court, as has been the case with any of the athletes on the team that made mistakes and were taken out, but that was not the case. In fact, she didn't play for the next two days, lost the captain position and still was never told why. She called the coach twice after the final match and after she calmed down. He never returned her call. She is in the middle of her season and is feeling lied to and let down. She wants to know what is going on and he will not respond. To make matters worse, the player that took her position is the coach’s daughter. What should my daughter do?
Dear Leza,
It sounds like your daughter is in the middle of a very challenging situation with her high school volleyball team. Before I get to the heart of what I think your daughter can do right now, let me mention a number of powerful positives from your message: 1) Your daughter worked really hard and gave 100% of her effort to win the starting position at the beginning of the season. Even though times are tough now, you can let her know how proud you are of her for putting in the time and energy to have initially won the starting job. 2) Once things became challenging, it sounds like your daughter reached out to the coach herself to try to have a conversation directly with the coach. This is fantastic on multiple levels. It can be tough for a parent to stay back and let his or her child handle this herself, and it sounds like you did that. Also, your daughter must be one strong young woman to have made those calls. So, these are all positives you can reinforce with your daughter, even though things are not easy right now.
As for what she can do right now, I'd suggest one more attempt to contact the coach to talk (either via email or phone). If she ends up leaving a message, she can say something like, "I've made multiple attempts to talk to you, and if I don't hear back from you within 24 hours, I am going to take this to the Athletic Director." This let's the coach know that your daughter is ready to take this to the next level, and it gives him a chance to respond before she does. High school coaches should be willing to talk to their players about playing time and what they need to do to potentially get more of it, and if I were the AD in this school, I would want to hear from my athletes when this was not happening.
Although it's not easy to do, perhaps you can also help your daughter to see all of the things she loves about being part of the high school volleyball team, even if she is not playing as much as she would like. Perhaps using "asking rather than telling" could work well here: "What are some of your favorite things about being part of this team?" Sometimes, when playing time issues arise, it's easy to lose focus on all of the other great benefits of being part of a team, and perhaps you can help your daughter remember these things.
To learn about some tools (such as "asking rather than telling") you can visit the Responsible Sport Parenting Guide
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