Sleep vs. Soccer

This week was and still is soccer tryouts, and I am feeling myself reaching a breaking point. I was saved by Veterans' Day, which allowed me to make up for the previous nights of only four and five hours of sleep. One thing I was not aware of when I jumped on the boys' soccer bandwagon was the fact that the practices do not start until 5:30. Knowing traffic in the Bay Area, I totally understand that it is nearly impossible for the other coaches to make it right after school, and plus, we don't have the practice space at that time anyway, but this is news that actually would have made me think twice about helping out. Since I live in Oakland, about a 20-30 minute traffic-ridden drive, it is impossible for me to go home between the end of school at 3:07 and this awkward start time. It particularly sucks on those days where 6th period is just off the wall bonkers and all I want to do is get out of that windowless building.

Then the fact that it is tryouts week makes it even more crazy because 100 boys showed up to try out for a varsity and a JV team, which means we have to cut upwards of 60 kids. And let me just say that after a year and a half in TFA making sure every kid is empowered to do well and improve in math, it is very hard for me to be able to deal with cutting players in tryouts. It just feels so mean, and I almost feel like I shouldn't be allowed to cut players that are better than I was in high school. We are fortunate enough to be in the unfortunate situation of having too many high-skilled players than the teams have room for. The icing on the cake is the fact that I already know a bunch of them from my classes this year and last, and it kills me to think that I may have to ride out the rest of the year with some students that think that they were personally cut by their math teacher. If I weren't so competitive and eager to get the best team, I would just make sure that none of my math students get cut - that way, at least I would know that they would try much harder in math. For some of these boys, having sports as a grades motivator is a night-and-day switch in school attitude.

However, being exposed to these kids in two worlds each day is a little daunting to me because I feel like there is way too much potential for me to make a fool out of myself in front of my math kids. Manny is already calling me "Coach" in class, and the soccer staff refers to me as "Coach Scott," so I predict the name thing will be a source of frustration. On top of that, after three nights of tryouts, I have realized that I do not know how to coach at all, which is not a good thing since the head coach pretty much told me that I'm "in charge of the JV team," and JV has the most students that I know. I set up a meeting this weekend with the head coaches to talk about "coaching strategies," and if you read in between the lines, I really want to talk about "how to coach kids that are almost as good as you."

Anyway, each night after tryouts ended at 8:30 we went to a burger place to discuss each and every player and who to cut or put on a specific team. Considering the number of players, I didn't get home each night until about 10:30, with few plans for my three classes the next day - which made me realize that what was sustainable before will not be sustainable now. I have to figure out a more efficient way to plan for my classes. The teacher across the hall is coaching girls' soccer, and she told me to "just face the fact that your teaching will get a little worse," so I'm a little scared. It doesn't help that my algebra students, who were doing great last unit, are totally sucking it up this unit. I know that part of it or even most of it rests on my shoulders, but I've been seeing a lack of motivation from the class that did so awesome on the last test.

So how am I supposed to reward the classes that do well if they slack off after I tell them how well they are doing? It's just like how it's dangerous to give certain students a B grade. For some students, this is a motivator to do better considering how close they are to an A grade, but for others, this means that they can stop caring about the class for a while, because all they need is a C to move to the next class. So frustrating. And now I can't commit a million hours to after school tutoring, so I fear the results on our next unit test. I hope at the very least that if I'm risking all this, I enjoy coaching.