existential crisis, take 10

If one more mother makes a "helpful" suggestion on how she would like her child to be coached, I may punch someone.

This general theme of annoyance (with the taut pull of arm muscles) made up most of March. Lately, it hasn't been the kids. It's the moms.

Here are my suggestions:

• Realize that sometimes, your kid has a bad meet and it's not the coach's fault;
• Realize that sometimes, your kid will have a good meet and still not win an award, though she placed 3rd (or whatever) last meet;
• Spend over a decade in the sport so that you can coach your own child, since obviously you already know so much.

Instead, I take out my aggression by reading Game of Thrones. 

The gentler one

They like me because I'm the gentler one. Sometimes I can call it: the littlest girls leave the gym with tears in their eyes, and the next day, I know that I'll get a text from my boss: "Colleen wants a lesson with you."

I can be mean (can't we all, under certain circumstances?), but when it comes to skills that they're afraid of, I am not. I know what that fear is like. They'll stand on the high beam and shake.

I put them back on the low beam. I tell them to put every mat they want under the high beam. We'll take them away one at a time. It will be a slow deconstruction. But it will work.

Lest we forget our roots

Thanks to Adie, this is too good not to share.

Things I don't miss about actively participating as a gymnast, part two:

The perma-knot in my left shoulder.

In the last two years of college, that thing solidified and would not budge. I probed it as I sat in class or idled at red lights. I asked boyfriends and friends to massage it. Sometimes, it felt like it was loosening. But moments later, it hardened back into perma-knot form.

It took a good while to ease after graduation, that ball of stress and clenched muscle. If I hit up open gym, it fired back with its old fury. But if I laid off on basically anything besides dancing, it slipped back into dormancy.

As I dragged my bag through the airport this morning, I remembered that old chestnut. The steady, tight presence that never ached in the gym, just everywhere else.

That was always the way of it, wasn't it? At the beginning of practice, you started warming up slowly, thinking of the pain, and then by the time you were standing under the bar ready to do pull-ups, you had forgotten everything. 

Things I don't miss about actively participating as a gymnast:

Waking up too early for school/class/life, sleepwalking through the day, and fearing that practice would kill me, just about literally. I could hurt myself in such a state.

You would think that the fear would wake me up, but instead it was a mix of worry and lethargy. Like drinking black coffee and watching your fingers twitch, wondering if eventually your brain would catch on.

I can live without that feeling.

What happens when you've been at a compulsory competition for too long

Humming with the music turns to making up lyrics for the music turns to covering your ears/eyes, trying to make it go away.

Mentally judging the other routines turns to counting how many girls are left in the rotation. Is there really a whole team that still needs to compete floor while everyone else is done? Really?

The host gym has this weird thing where parents can make shout-outs to their kids, which are read out loud by the meet director during warm-ups. It's all pretty generic, like, "Dear Alex, We love you! Good luck from Mom, Dad, Timmy, and Skittles."

When you've been there for more than three hours, you start to hope that the shout-outs will sound like this:

Some [girls] have all the luck

Yesterday, I had a lesson with one of the Level 5's. Cute child, well-behaved, did a nice job.

Today, my boss texts me to say that the child has lice.

...

Floor music fun for your Wednesday

I really like this instrumental. I'm sure that somewhere in the NCAA, someone is doing a techno remix of it.

Plus, there are pretty colors!

You, me, and an 8.3

So.

The IGC team placed second yesterday against some heavy-hitters. They won medals and so on and so forth.

Except their scores barely made it to the 8's, and occasionally, the 9's.

I judge now and I've been around gymnastics long enough to know an 8.5 routine from a 9.0. I watched a girl from another team do a spectacular vault and stick the landing. Height, amplitude, form -- it's all there. 9.3, 9.4, I thought. The score went up. 8.65.

Kathryn did a floor routine without a fall or a missed requirement. Not a 9.0 performance, but anywhere between an 8.6 to an 8.8, I thought, because that's what she normally scored.

8.0. Boom. Roasted.

She asked me what she'd done to lose 2.0, and I had to think about it through the meet. Finally I said, "I think the judge took off points for literally every step you took."

It's things like this that make kids lose interest in gymnastics. Inexplicably low scores when they do solid routines. A two-tenth difference in scores between an okay routine and a girl who was clearly much better. And as I looked around the gym, I could see that it wasn't just us. It was every team. One coach said that the floor judge did not give anyone on his team credit for a certain requirement. A dozen kids. Not one?

I don't understand judging so close to the chest. If you give someone a 9.0, and the next girl is better, you have plenty of room to go up. Hence the 9.025, the 9.050, the 9.075... Give the best their due, but don't kill the entire field in the interim.

But in the meantime, as coaches, we have a few choices. We can get pissed at the scores. (Check.) We can get pissed at the kids. And/or we can try to keep them afloat.

"I'm not even going to get an 8," Amy says worriedly before her floor routine.

At this rate, no, she won't. "Look, I don't care what you get," I tell her. "Do a nice routine and don't worry about it, okay?"

The words were by no means a magical inspirational salve, but I wanted to make it clear: sometimes, there's only so much a gymnast can do, and you have to let the rest go.

Conversations with a gymnast that I have coached for ~3 years

"Do you have a job?" nine-year-old Colleen asks.

"Yes, I have several," I say, and list them for her.

"Oh," she says. "I didn't know that you worked here."

"What did you think I do, hang out?"

The tell-tale smile proves that I'm right.

Internet memes, or how to be a terrible role model

There's many a practice where the older girls are giggly to the point where they can't get a thing done. They crack each other up. The tiniest phrase or word or stumble sends them off. Then they have to repeat/reenact it countless times.

Coach P. ignores them and works with the younger girls. Greg shakes his head. Sometimes I yell and the entire gym goes silent. Then they continue, but in whispers.

Other times, well...

They're practicing their beam routines, fairly productively, and it slips out of me: "Imagine Tebowing in a routine?"

Boom. Done. All of them more focused on their routines than they've ever been besides maybe at States. "I got it, I got it!" Natalie, the oldest, yells.

"Me, too, right here!" Kathryn says.

Kasey milks the pose for an extra moment.

Yep. Coach Instigator.