MY DAUGHTER’S COACH CALLED HER “DISGUSTING” – AND SAID IT RIGHT TO MY FACE
I never thought I’d be writing something like this, honestly. I always figured coaches were supposed to be the ones who build kids up, not knock them flat. But here we are.
So that’s my daughter, Petra, in the photo. Sweetest kid you’ll ever meet – sharp, funny, loves her fruit snacks, and just wants to fit in like everyone else. We’ve had some rough patches at the rec center this year, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened at yesterday’s parent meeting.
I sat across from her coach, Mr. Burrell, with Petra right there beside me, thinking we’d be talking about her footwork or maybe how she sometimes loses focus during drills. But instead, he just looked at her, then at me, and flat out said, “Honestly, I don’t put much energy into coaching her. She just looks so disgusting when she cries, it throws me off.”
I swear, I froze. Petra just stared at the floor, squeezing her water bottle, and all I could think was – did he really just say that? Right in front of her? Right in front of me? Like it was nothing? My hands were shaking. I had no words, just a thousand questions crashing around in my head. Who else had he said this to? How long has my daughter been hearing this from someone she’s supposed to trust?
I didn’t even finish the meeting. I just took Petra’s hand and walked out.
Now I’m
The Drive Home
Now I’m sitting in the parking lot of a Walgreens three blocks from the rec center, writing this on my phone while Petra eats a pack of gummy bears in the back seat and pretends to watch a video.
She’s not watching the video. I can see her face in the rearview mirror.
I keep replaying it. The way Mr. Burrell said it so casually, like he was commenting on the weather or a parking situation. Not even lowering his voice. Petra was right there, maybe two feet from him, and he just said it. Disgusting. Like she wasn’t a person. Like she was a problem he’d been tolerating.
The drive to the rec center this morning had been normal. Petra made me play the same song twice. She complained about her shin guards being itchy. She asked if we could get tacos after and I said probably yes. That was forty-five minutes ago and it feels like a different week.
I turned around at the stoplight on Crescent and asked her if she was okay. She shrugged. Said “yeah, I’m fine.” The way kids say it when they absolutely are not fine but don’t have the words yet, or maybe don’t trust that the words will help.
I didn’t push it. I just drove.
What I Knew Before Yesterday
Here’s the thing. I’d had a low-grade bad feeling about Mr. Burrell since maybe October.
Nothing I could point to. He never said anything outright, nothing I could’ve taken to the rec center director and put on a form. It was more like the way Petra stopped talking about practice. She used to come home and recap the whole thing, who scored, who fell, who said something funny during the water break. Around October she just started saying “it was fine” and going to her room.
I asked her once if she liked her coach. She said he was “okay.” Then she asked me if we had any of those fruit snacks left, the strawberry kind, and the conversation was over.
I told myself I was being one of those parents. Overcorrecting, reading into things. Petra’s a sensitive kid and I’ve spent most of her life trying to balance protecting her with letting her figure out that not everything is comfortable and that’s okay. I second-guess myself constantly on that line.
So I let it go. October, November. She kept going to practice. She wasn’t quitting, wasn’t crying on the way there, wasn’t begging me to let her stay home. I figured whatever it was had sorted itself out.
It hadn’t sorted itself out.
The Meeting I Thought We Were Having
The parent meeting was his idea, not mine. He sent a group text to about twelve families saying he wanted to do individual check-ins before the spring session registration opened. I thought that was actually a good sign. Proactive. Engaged.
I told Petra about it and she went quiet in a specific way I recognized but didn’t know how to read. I asked if she wanted to come in with me or wait in the lobby and she said she’d come in. I was glad. I thought it would be good for her to hear someone talk about her progress, give her a moment of feeling seen.
We sat down in this little office off the main gym, the one with the whiteboard covered in play diagrams and a folding table with two chairs on one side, one on the other. Mr. Burrell came in, sat down, didn’t offer us anything, didn’t say hi to Petra directly.
He had a clipboard. He flipped to her name.
He said something about her positioning being inconsistent. Said she had trouble with the mental side of competition. That part was fine, I was taking notes in my head, thinking about how we could work on it at home.
And then.
“Honestly, I don’t put much energy into coaching her. She just looks so disgusting when she cries, it throws me off.”
I’ve been trying to figure out, since it happened, what his face looked like when he said it. I think he looked slightly tired. Like someone describing a commute.
What Petra Said in the Car
We sat in the Walgreens parking lot for maybe twenty minutes. I bought her the gummy bears and a Sprite and I got a coffee I didn’t need and couldn’t drink. The cup is still in the cupholder getting cold.
After a while she said, “He says stuff like that a lot.”
I kept my voice as flat as I could. Asked her what she meant.
She said he’d told her once that she was “too emotional to be coachable.” Said it in front of two other girls on the team. She said she’d cried later, not at practice, in the bathroom at home, because she didn’t want him to see her cry and say something about that too.
My kid. Crying alone in the bathroom so her coach wouldn’t have more material.
She said she didn’t tell me because she thought I’d make it a big thing and she didn’t want to be the reason the team had a problem. She’s ten. She was managing the situation. She’d been managing it since October.
I told her she should have told me. Then I told her I was sorry she felt like she couldn’t. Both things are true and they don’t cancel each other out.
She ate three more gummy bears and asked if we could still get tacos.
We got tacos.
What Happens to a Kid When You Call Them That
I’m not going to pretend I have this figured out. I’m not a child psychologist. I’m a person who works in accounts receivable and coaches her daughter’s feelings the same way most parents do, which is imperfectly and with a lot of guessing.
But I know what it does to a kid when an adult they’re supposed to trust tells them their natural emotional responses are disgusting. I know because I can see it. Petra’s been pulling her sleeves down over her hands more than usual lately, this habit she gets when she’s self-conscious. I noticed it and told myself it was cold. It hasn’t been that cold.
She stopped wanting to wear her team jersey to school on game days. I thought she’d outgrown it. She hadn’t outgrown it. She’d been told her face was a problem.
That’s months of small erosions I missed because I talked myself out of my instincts. That part’s going to sit with me for a while.
The Calls I’m Making Monday Morning
I’ve already drafted the email to the rec center director. It’s sitting in my drafts folder and I’ve read it six times. It’s not angry, which took some effort. It’s specific. It has dates, it has the direct quote, it has Petra’s account of the bathroom incident and the “too emotional to be coachable” comment in front of the other girls.
I’m not going to the spring session registration. That’s done.
What I want is for this to be documented. I want someone at that rec center to have to look at the words “I don’t put much energy into coaching her, she looks so disgusting when she cries” on paper with their name on the building and decide what they’re going to do with that.
I want to know if other kids have been in that little office with the whiteboard and the folding table and come out with something broken in them that their parents are still trying to find.
I called my sister Karen after the tacos. She’s better at being angry on my behalf than I am, which is its own useful skill. She said I should post about it. I said I’d think about it.
I thought about it for about four hours and here we are.
Petra’s asleep now. She went to bed in her regular pajamas, the ones with the little frogs on them, and I tucked her in and she asked me if she was going to have to go back to that practice. I told her no. She said okay and closed her eyes and was asleep in about three minutes the way she’s always been able to do, since she was a baby, this total immediate sleep like flipping a switch.
I stood in the doorway for a minute watching her breathe.
She doesn’t know yet how much of this I’m going to make a thing. She doesn’t know I’m writing this. She doesn’t know that I’ve already found three other parents from that team on Facebook and sent them each a message tonight asking if they had a few minutes to talk.
Two of them have already replied.
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If your kid has been on the receiving end of something like this, you know the specific sick feeling I’m describing. Share this if it matters to you.
For more stories that hit you right in the feels, read about the woman who sat in the same laundromat corner for months or the time I cried in the bathroom for ten minutes and nobody noticed. You might also appreciate the old man at the bus depot with the giant plant.
