Confronting My High School Basketball CoachIn discussing what I should do to process my emotions, we brought up the idea of having a meeting with Coach Adams. A few of the Shawnee staff offered to moderate. I wanted to look Adams in the eye and have a man-to-man conversation about how I felt.
After a short time I began to have second thoughts about a meeting. I thought, Do I really want to see him again? While deeply deliberating it, I stopped in to a 7-11 to get a Sprite. As I pulled in, one of the Shawnee staff members was getting into his car. He said, “Hey Tyson, did you still want to do that meeting with Adams?” I was put on the spot and had to make an immediate decision. I replied, “Yes, I do.” He said, “Okay, I’ll set it up for next week.” Preparing for the meeting, I brought with me the thirty-five pages I wrote down. I specified certain areas which I thought had the most impact. I hoped that would get it out in the open so he could understand where I was coming from. On the day of the meeting, we walked into the conference room with my mom and dad accompanying me. With about six administrators sitting around us, I positioned myself across from Coach Adams in the middle of the table. In front of him, a notebook was placed on the desk. I thought, What the hell is that for? A staff member began the meeting by thanking everybody for coming. Then they said, “Okay Tyson, what would you like to talk with Coach Adams about?” I started with, “I’m wondering why you were such a jerk to me.” From there, I brought up different instances and scenarios about what I wanted to say. However, a minute into the discussion, I knew it was going nowhere. For everything I said he had a rebuttal of his own. In one scenario, I told him it hurt when he called me an outcast. He responded by saying, “Well, you are an outcast. You rarely hang out with the team.” Another time I asked him why he always called me selfish. He said, “Because you only focus on yourself too much.” I felt like he put everything back on me, about how I was wrong for every scenario. We went back and forth for another fifteen minutes until I realized I was just wasting my time. Annoyed at the whole thing, my mom asked him some questions, with my dad ending by saying, “After everything we’ve done for you, this is how you treat us? What the hell is wrong with you man?” At that, the board members said it was time to finish up, since it was obvious that my dad was getting too angry. As we walked out, I still looked at Adams straight in the eye and shook his hand. A few days later, the board members said they had a lot of respect for me when I shook his hand, considering the circumstances. |
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