Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 177

Dear Melanie,

This is a long, long, long overdue letter that I’ve been thinking about writing for a long time. Let me start by telling you about what finally pushed me to write it. 

The other day, I received a message from a player I used to coach. Did you know I coached high school field hockey for eight years? It was the hardest, most challenging job of my life. Harder than being the youngest and only female writer covering sports for the local newspaper, harder than waiting tables and being slammed on a Friday night, harder than pursuing acting and humiliating myself on an improv stage. None of those compared to the mental angst that was coaching high school girls. 

So this player messages me out of the blue to thank me. She says I’m a big part of the reason she’s playing field hockey in college. She says she knows I was really hard on them, and lots of the girls resented me for that, but she was grateful to me for pushing her to try her hardest. 

Receiving a note like that from a player felt great. More than that, I audibly sighed with relief because most of the time I felt hated by the girls. Not all of them. There were some who made my job easy. But there were always at least a few players who didn’t like what I had to say, didn’t like how I coached, and it was always those players who zapped me of all the joy I did have to be out on the field. 

I once approached a player after practice. She was a senior and one of the best players. Her attitude had taken a turn and I asked her about it. I wasn’t soft in my delivery and I’m sure I didn’t make her feel safe. And she attacked back. She told me I was a terrible coach. She told me all the girls hated me and the parents were conspiring behind my back to have me fired. 

I got in my car to drive home and cried. I got home to my husband (then-boyfriend) and cried some more. I called my boss and told her I might have to quit. We met the next day for lunch. She was a mom of a teenager. She told me kids are like sharks and they can smell blood in the water. 

I kept coaching.

Another time, coaching for another team, I had all three senior captains approach me after practice. Again, unhappy with me, unhappy with the way I was coaching. I wanted to scream, “Do you know how much I am giving to this team?! How much time and effort and care I put into every practice?!” 

What I actually responded with was some version of, “Too bad,” and they went on to hate me for the rest of the season. 

I don’t think I was a very good coach. I underestimated all the nuance and important pieces of what it means to lead a team and bring them together. It wasn’t until later years I realized it wasn’t about winning and losing. It was about being a part of a team and building character. 

I’ve thought of you often throughout the years. I’ve thought of how things ended my senior year and how I blamed you for our team not doing well because it was easier to blame you than to take responsibility for my part in all of it. 

But looking back I can see you had my best interest in mind. You had weekly meetings with me to talk about my grades. You attended every event where I was honored for something academically. You called my parents and invited them to one such event. My mom told me later you said it was important for them to be there. It was. You forced the entire team to come see me in the school play! I didn’t know it was mandatory, I just thought everyone wanted to support me. I learned later that attending the play was as much of an option as attending a morning workout with our team trainer.

You were also the person who sat me down in a meeting, right before senior year, and asked me what was important to me. I had lost a lot of weight. I had, in fact, become obsessed with my weight and got expertly skilled at limiting my calorie intake while doing extra workouts at the gym late at night and in between practices. You didn’t know the extent of it, but you didn’t need to. I was weak, and I was getting knocked around in practice. When you asked me what was important, I said field hockey, and that was all it took for me to put back on the weight. I had a rough 10 years ahead of me with weight and body image, but I would never go to the extremes that I went to during junior year of college. 

You were never just thinking about the game. You were thinking about our lives after college. To coach us AND help us grow into strong, capable, independent women? I’ve never heard of a job like that. 

I’m a mom of two now. My son is 3 years old and my daughter is 18 months old. Your daughter was just a little girl when you were coaching us. I think now about what it must have been like to juggle parenting while coaching a Division I field hockey team. 

Anyway, all this is to say, thank you for coaching me. Thank you for all you did and all you gave to the field hockey program. I’ve held back all these years from sending you a message because I was scared how it might be received. How maybe you were the one angry with me. But after I got that message from a former player, I knew I had to do it. 

I sometimes wonder about players I’ve coached and how they’re doing now. I wonder if I had a positive impact, a negative impact, or any impact at all.

I didn’t want you to wonder. 

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Bleecker Bombs

A new memoir deep dive is out! 

This episode is a little different because I talk about two books I did not like: Finding Me by Viola Davis and Based On A True Story by Norm Macdonald. Then I end with something I fucking loved, an essay by David Sedaris. 

Listen to the episode on overcast.fm, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.

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Until next week,

Charlie