Cut…for
the very first time
January 6, 2013
I got the
phone call on a dreary Sunday afternoon in January, why was my coach calling me
I asked myself. I had just seen him the day before at our team practice and we
chatted; maybe he forgot to tell me something I thought. After our quick
pleasantries and discussion about yesterday’s practice, I noticed he started to
stammer and stutter. I tried to follow along in the conversation and asked a
few questions as he finally came out with it…”I’ve never done this before, and
don’t really know how to say it”. My curiosity was piqued now and I waited
patiently for him to get out the words…as I waited, I thought, “how bad could
it be”? I meant for that to be a rhetorical question and then he said it,
“You’re cut from the team”. What, I thought. How is this possible? I was just
at practice yesterday, and there were not any signs that I could see. After a
long silence from me, I asked some of these questions and he was kind enough to
answer all of them. It did not have anything to do with my attitude, my
personality or my skill. I just was not in the plan for “the direction that
they were going”. I was a little confused by this and asked what direction it
was that they were headed…it was age, meaning that they were going for a
younger demographic. With me being 37 at the time, I could see what they meant
by it but my gut wasn’t ‘buying’ it. When the conversation was finished, he had
hung up the phone as I stood there still holding it in my hand. I was in shock,
I was in disbelief, I was numb. Had this really just happened? Was I really
just ‘cut’ from an adult slo-pitch team? How did this happen?
All of
these questions were swirling through my head and I could not make heads or
tails of it…I just stood there dumbfounded. I immediately called my girlfriend
and teammate and found that as I described the scene to her, I broke down and
cried. Yes, I was a grown ass woman and I broke down and cried. I don’t know if
it was because I never experienced being let go from anything before OR if it
had to do with my break-up 6 months ago. I suspect it was the latter as my
conversation went on with my friend, I heard myself say things like “I can’t
stay on a team of misfits, no wonder I couldn’t make a relationship work”. It
was a low point for me and I was releasing any last emotions that I had carried
forward from my break-up.
Once the
realization started to sink in, I also thought to myself that I had never been
cut from anything before. I had played sports all my life and never once was I
on the end of the girls who did not make the team. This was also a new
discovery for me and what a feeling it was…I was down, then up, and then down
again. So many questions go through your mind and you start to wonder what you
did wrong and how to improve so that you don’t have to go through this again.
In the end,
being cut from the team helped me to get a workout program started and overall
I became a better player. Being able to keep up with and sometimes surpass the
20 year olds, makes me feel like a million bucks. It was a lesson that I
learned later in life but one that I will always remember.
