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You're supposed to be better than this.

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  • #1

    You're supposed to be better than this.

    Several years ago, a local Little League team won the World Championships. IIRC, they won again the next year. In the years since, they've still managed to get pretty far despite some kids outgrowing the age limit and new kids joining the team. So you would expect the local team to be full of good role models, as the adults hold them to high standards, right?

    Dead wrong.

    My family went out to a local pizza buffet/arcade celebrate my daughter's second birthday. It was fine for about ten minutes. Then the team arrived, accompanied by at least 4-5 adults. They absolutely DESTROYED the buffet, and when they finished, they moved on to the arcade. There, they were moving the machines around to find tokens, running around screaming, hitting each other with the whack-a-mole hammer, complaining that my husband and I had our daughter in there (she loves Skee Ball)... they were just being horrible.

    The employees were being rather generous with tokens on this particular day and ended up giving my husband $25 worth for only $10- I guess the kids were getting to them, too. He used them all on one particular game, ran it out of tickets, waited around for a guy to come put more in so it could continue giving him his tickets, ran it out of tickets AGAIN, and just gave up because he'd used all of his tokens and the machine only owed him a few more tickets anyway. This whole thing took about half an hour, and some of the kids were complaining that he was hogging the machine- he only spent five minutes actually putting tokens in and the rest of the time it was slowly doling out tickets, so it's not like he had a choice in the matter.

    I think the worst part though was the adults. They weren't wearing anything identifying them as team supporters/employees/whatever, but they were walking around, taking pictures, scolding me for letting my daughter walk around in the arcade area (she wasn't causing trouble and I was doing my best to keep the rowdy kids from running her over but that apparently wasn't enough), and generally not acting like adults at all.

    I had to leave at one point to go sit in the car while I had an anxiety attack from being around so many loud kids. Hubs was at the prize counter by this point, but the team had taken all of the good prizes already and those that were still crowding the counter were complaining about nothing being left. Hubs got a ticket count, had a guy write it on the back of a ticket and sign it so we could come back later, and we left.
    The fact that jellyfish have survived for 650 million years despite not having brains gives hope to many people.

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  • #2
    Sometimes, and very rarely at that, when there is a robotics competition there will one group that does something to tick off the locals. I say rarely because the local teams want to keep good with the businesses, there is almost always a teacher in ear shot where ever you go and their t shirts all have their team name and number on them.

    Why is the last part important? Cause unless your team wins the actual competition misbehavior outside the competition that gets back to the judges will most likely mean your team will win no prizes and not be able to go to the world championship.

    Soon the adults crack the whip.

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    • #3
      Hopefully, the other adults will crack the whip on THESE particular adults.
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      • #4
        Quoth EricKei View Post
        Hopefully, the other adults will crack the whip on THESE particular adults.
        I would write a general Letter to the Editor and let everyone know what a bunch of spoiled brats these people are!

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        • #5
          Sad but true: being a good athlete doesn't make you a good person. How many times do sports stars show up in the news for driving drunk or worse?
          "I try to be curious about everything, even things that don't interest me." -Alex Trebek

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          • #6
            Quoth Aragarthiel View Post
            So you would expect the local team to be full of good role models, as the adults hold them to high standards, right?
            You have a more positive outlook than I.

            My answer: NO. Not at all. I was never in competitive sports as a kid (I never cared who won, so I took ballet and horseback riding and such), but my friends were. This led to me being on the sidelines of various sports. When one of my friend's fast pitch team had an excellent season, that's when I noticed how crazy many of the parents were. Some people are just not good winners. And once the parents start acting like that, of course the kids follow along, especially when in big groups.
            Replace anger management with stupidity management.

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            • #7
              Everyone always says that sports "build character." The thing is, there has to be some decent character there to begin with. With some people, there just isn't anything to work with!
              When you start at zero, everything's progress.

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              • #8
                Back when I was in marching band, we could have been disqualified from band competitions for behaving the way it was described in the OP. Granted, this was the 1970s, but good manners don't go out of fashion. I think the most trouble any of us ever got in was getting lost, but at least the people who got lost had the sense to contact the local police.

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