Please don't think I'm a sadist. I'm not the type of person to thrive on children crying. Rather, it's the epiphany in the girls that pleases me: the moment of, "Oh, gymnastics is difficult and I have to work hard now? I had no idea!"
The spell is brief.
The parental complaints begin to wear on my boss. Eventually she asks Coach P. not to push the girls in their splits. Coach P. rolls his eyes -- how do the parents expect their children to do well in competition with being babied at practice? But he understands that this too is a business.
The little ones, Generation 4.0, take to Coach P. the best. Besides Larissa, they are unintimidated. More of the parents are on board. They do what he asks.
But the older girls, the ones whose competitive woes brought Coach P. here in the first place, soon revert back to their ways. Giggling, sitting around, complaining.
I wonder how Maya will react to Coach P. Here she has the opportunity to learn from an elite-level coach. To get stronger on bars and to add to her already powerful tumbling and vault repertoire. I wonder if she'll be subdued, listen to him the way she doesn't listen to the rest of us.
And she is and does. For about three days.
"She is really annoying," Coach P. soon says.
Maya just doesn't care. And she doesn't care if she distracts her teammates in her apathy.
The culmination took place at a practice that, sadly, I was not at. Apparently Maya was more of a piece of work than usual. Coach P. let it go. At the end, as the girls stood before him, he started to give an inspirational talk about hard work. Maya began interrupting, talking over him, moving around.
Coach P. threw his clipboard to the ground. He told Maya that she wasn't a very good gymnast and that he didn't want her on the team. I don't know if the girls were frightened by the clipboard or his words or both, but evidently they all walked out of the gym with pale faces, some in tears.
The only parent who wasn't distressed to hear this from her daughter? Maya's mom. "Good," she said to my boss. "Someone's got to put her in line."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment