“Dad, did you ever play on uneven teams? Is that something that happens all the time?”
In typical the boy fashion, he posed a question completely out of left-field. No segue to speak of, no hint it was coming. Not that this was a subject that I have difficult dealing with. It would just be nice to have a heads up for once.
So the deal is they were playing Capture the Flag. When the teams got formed, all the fast, athletic boys were on one team while the boy’s team had a couple of girls and other less athletic boys. Frankly, it was a fairly classic situation on school playgrounds around the country that I’m sure has been happening ever since the first recess was held at a school. In this particular case, the other team formed because they are a group of boys that hang together a lot and they basically just declared themselves all on a team.
The problem came up because the boy put up a stink. He started arguing with the players on the other team and he ultimately ended up calling them “big, fat, sore losers” which, in my book, rates about a 2 on the insult scale. But, it’s a new generation and apparently that’s pretty serious stuff. I’m also not quite sure the other team was the “sore loser” in this instance, but I’ll ignore that.
So the games were played and ultimately the incident was resolved when a couple of the offended boys told their teacher about the incident and the boy apologized.
So what was the boy after? I think mainly, he wanted some kind of affirmation that he was in the right. He wanted to know that he’d been correct to confront the other team like that. But, I also think he suspected he could have handled it better.
One obvious angle was him losing his temper and calling them names. But that was easy and even he understood he shouldn’t have done that. Another possible angle was sportsmanship. Yet another possibility was to remind him the best way to deal with people you think are cheating is to just beat them.
He’s heard all that before, though. So I wanted to come up with a different angle.
I asked him if, if he complains about all the “best players” being on the other team, how does he think that makes the players on his team feel? By arguing so hard about the unfairness of the teams, he was basically saying the players he had on his team were worthless. I went on to try and explain that to be a leader and to try and get the most out of teammates, he couldn’t start by insinuating they were worthless.
He was quiet for a bit.
Which was a good thing, because I knew that meant he was thinking about what I’d said. At that point, it was the best I could hope for.