Fair Play

From the let’s-all-be-good-sports department there is this article about a coach for a 9-10 year old baseball team walking a good hitter so a cancer survivor could come to bat. The coach is under fire for allegedly ‘picking’ on this cancer survivor kid.

The kid’s father put it like this

“It made me sick,” says Romney’s dad, Marlo Oaks. “It’s going after the weakest chick in the flock.”

Now, other than the fact that the kid’s dad called him a ‘chick’, I don’t understand the problem here. They didn’t ‘go after’ anyone. It’s a championship baseball game. The coach used valid baseball strategy to walk the better hitter and bring the worse one up to bat. Doing anything different would have been a disservice to his team. Personally, I would have done the exact same thing.

There is a valuable lesson to be learned here for Romney Oaks, and the rest of us. The only way we can be winners all the time is if we rely on someone else’s pity. How terrible would it have been if the Sox had won that game soley because a coach felt sorry for Romney? How lucky was Romney to have an opportunity to win that championship game?

This young cancer survivor may have sobbed himself to sleep that night, but I’m guessing he wasn’t alone. I’ve been a 9 year old boy and losing a game like that probably caused lots of tears in pillows that night. Romney and his teamates weren’t discriminated against, abused or even treated poorly. They went into that game as competitors, played their best game and lost fairly. Rather than crying about the coach’s call Romney’s father should be teaching his son how to get back up and compete again. Life is full of dissapointment, it’s the individuals that can face their failures and try again that are the heros in life.