We are all to blame

I am a parent. I am a coach. I am a player. We are all to blame.

Today is Wednesday, May 25th. I am sitting here trying to finish a blog post about the blame game. I wanted to write a piece about how every week I am inundated with emails from parents annoyed or mistreated by their club, emails from coaches frustrated with the crazy parents and emails from players who feel helpless and hopeless with all that is on their plates. 

My direction for this piece was going to be about how we are all to blame. That it’s not just one group's fault. That we all have a contribution in this. We are ALL to blame for the many issues in our sport.  And as I was writing, the school shooting happened at Robb Elementary in Uvalde Texas. I have been glued to the news and my social platforms to try to find the words that I resonate with. If you don’t know, I am not just the founder of FF, I am also a teacher and a social emotional coach in an elementary school. This type of situation hits home. It was around the time of Sandy Hook when I started Female Footballers. I am sad, devastated and angry. Very angry. 

So I spent the whole day trying to finish this blog on the blame game and I have decided that how I am feeling about this tragedy is actually connected to the issues in our sport. I feel similarly about the two. The phrase, WHAT ARE WE DOING, keeps popping up in my head.  What are we doing? Senator Murphy said it on the senate floor the other day after this event unfolded. I have been asking myself that in the classroom and on the soccer field. What are we doing to our youth? WE are all to blame. We provide a youth system for them to play in that does not always put their development as people and players at the forefront. As parents, some care more about how their performance makes them look or feel rather than how it makes their children feel. They get caught up in getting their self worth from the accolades their children obtain. As coaches, some of us are stuck in the past, joysticking, berating and others struggle to find the resources we need to make the biggest impact because those resources are nonexistent. As players we are facing more pressure than ever before and people wonder why the hell we are dropping out, taking breaks or even taking our own lives. 

We are all to blame. 

I feel the same way in the classroom. I have to do training every year where I watch a fake active shooter drill. A local police dept gathers high school students to reenact a mass shooter situation. We watch it as teachers and learn that we must first run, then hide and lastly defend. Those training sessions make me sick to my stomach. But worse than that, we have to practice these drills with children. We teach them to get low, stay quiet, hide, and barricade doors. They look up at me and ask why? And I have to come up with answers. But I am not allowed to tell them the truth. The truth is because our system is failing our youth. That the adults in their world are failing them. We can’t seem to get our shit together to make it safer, and better for them. 

And I feel the same about soccer lately. Maybe life mimics sport. But in that realm I, too, feel that we are failing our youth. We need to get our shit together to make it safer and better for our girls. We all have one thing in common…we like to blame others for all the bad and wrong things in our world or in our sport. But we rarely are good at taking responsibility for our failures. How can we expect our girls to move past failure and persevere if we can't admit fault? Are we modeling what we expect from them? Same with our kids in schools. How can we expect them to learn, feel safe, feel loved, if they are terrified to go to school everyday?

I am not writing this because I have all the answers. I am simply fed up and I want change. I started FF because we need change. And if I can’t change the system we have set up in both our sport and in education, then I have to do something to help. Female Footballers is here for all groups. We support players, parents and coaches. We are neutral because we see that all of these groups have needs. I am a teacher because I want to help children be safe, love learning and thrive as critical thinkers someday. 

But before we can get to a place where changes are happening we have to get to a place where we admit that we all have contribution. We are all to blame for failing our youth whether it's in sport or school. No more pointing fingers. Let's do better. For everyone.