>>[Hurst66] The author talks about standing up to the club coach or DOC and saying "Enough....we're not doing all of those tournaments!" Easier said than done. I haven't seen too many highly-competitive teams who have managed to say "no". Nobody wants to put their own kid in a bad spot. As she states in one of her chapters.....the coach has all the power (even though the parents shell out the dollars).<<
The problem isn't as simple as "the coach wants one thing and the parents want another." My kid has switched clubs once, and only once, in her life. The reason she decided to do it at a relatively young age was that the team she was on wanted very different things than she wanted -- and that showed up in everything from practice to tournaments.
I guess I could have whined a lot about the other parents not supporting what my daughter (and her coach) wanted; but at the time when she asked to go to a club 100 miles away I thought my job as a parent was to either (a) say "yes" and support her or (b) say "no" and tell her other alternatives. I just didn't think about (c) writing a book and whining about how the other parents wouldn't do what I wanted them to do.
It's hard for me to have a lot of sympathy to the author's position...most of me wants to simply tell her to quit whining about it and make a decision. If your kids are ambitious and want to test their limits, then make a decision as to whether you're going to support them and at what level and then shut up and do it. If your kid isn't ambitious, or you don't want to support your kid, then simply tell the kid "no." If you're the parent, then step up and act like one.
