Darkness

I can’t imagine life without sports. Baseball and softball in particular have shaped me both as a person and a parent. If only sports were truly separate from the rest of life. Now, that would be something. Last week, a coach caught up in the USA Olympic gymnastics’ scandal killed himself. Among twenty-four felony charges filed by Michigan authorities, John Geddert was accused of human trafficking and sexual assault. Is gymnastics somehow more prone to this sort of thing than the youth sports my daughter took part in? I can’t honestly say. In retrospect, there were all sorts of chances for a coach to be a pervert, though, thankfully, none of them were, at least in terms of sexual predation. Maybe we were just lucky, maybe it’s in how different sports are taught and coached that allows for predators to act. The problems I saw concerned things said. When Clare played softball in high school, one of her varsity coaches was a real bench jockey; he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut when somebody made an error or didn’t respond to his coaching. We put up with it for two years until a health issue made the problem go away. I kept my mouth shut because this coach didn’t go after my daughter. But the man said hurtful things that I could have objected to and didn’t. That’s on me. In travel, Clare had a coach who disparaged her hitting on two separate occasions, one time telling her she’d never hit in college. Him I confronted, though for something else. This coach and his partner told me my daughter wasn’t a good infielder, which was a flat-out lie. I told both of them Clare was the best second baseman on their team. By the time the one guy popped off about Clare’s hitting, we were already gone, in a way. This one coach also did a Woody Hayes on a player, shaking her head by the cage of her helmet; I had to restrain the girl’s dad. Maybe I should’ve let him go at it. There are lines that can’t be crossed, in sports or any other part of life. The consequences come when we fail to act.