Jaina+M’s+2017+OpEd+Article

[[image:muckrakers/ugh.jpg width="397" height="289" align="right"]]  Favoritism at its Finest
Players go into a sport to gain experience of their sport of interest. They go into the sport thinking they’ll learn all the fundamentals and be coached equally amongst the other players. Sorry to crush every coach's heart, but players don’t sign up for a sport to sit there and watch the star player get all the attention.

On a team, the level of skill that each player obtains will be diverse- each player is obviously different. One may think a team is lucky if it has a couple players who have been playing that sport for copious years, but that is BS. A team is lucky if it has the required amount of players who are ready to acquire what is needed to excel at the sport.

Having a couple of club players would allow the coach to take the easy way out. The coach would feel like they have the opportunity to solely focus on perfecting the skills that the club players already have (which doesn’t take that much effort), rather than teaching the skills that would appear to be new to the new players. Sure the club players could lead the team to several victories and titles, but what would the coach do once the predominant players leave? Would the coach quit because they are lazy? Would the coach become enraged after facing some loses? Would they finally realize that the team is inexperienced due to their lack of ACTUALLY coaching?

Relying on a few players can only get a coach so far. As a coach, you have to rely on every single player that steps foot in the playing field, benched or not. When a question is asked or a demonstration is offered, the same player shouldn’t be raising their hand, every damn hand should be up.

To be a coach, you have to have patience. You can’t expect the players to master the techniques after doing it once or twice. It takes more than a few times for a player to be able to apply the newly learned skills into the game, so if none of the players apply the skills in the game, then you are failing as a coach. You can’t yell at your players for not doing the things you ask them to if they have only done it __once__ ! You also can’t yell at the player if they try to do what you say and don’t succeed after doing it __once__. You can only yell at yourself for lacking the patience gene.

Coaches must be willing to help out players when they ask for it. It is simply rude to ignore a player’s request for help and only respond to the players that you Snapchat and text on a daily basis. Favoritism not only aggravates the rest of the players, but it is a form of disrespect. It shows that you do not care about the presence of your other players. It puts them in the shadows, it leaves them questioning why they joined the team in the first place, it makes them want to quit. Athletes are not oblivious to conspicuous favoritism, and they are not afraid to quit and leave the coach without a team.