I invited Allie from Reckless to do a guest post today, the day after Thanksgiving. She's a great writer, enjoy and thank you Allie!
Hey everyone! I'm Allie, and I'm taking over this bad blog today and I am way too excited about it. (Thanks, Brenna!) I don't know if Brenna's still sleeping off the turkey (that's probably what I'm doing right now, which is why I wrote this long before the food coma set in) or if she was just feeling super nice and wanted to let me meet you all, but whatever the reason, I'm really glad she let me be here! I don't really get out much - I spend most of my time hanging out at my own space,
Reckless. The plus side to that is that I really like it there, but it also means that . . . you know, I'm home a lot. I get lonely and start wearing sweatpants all the time and eating too much Nutella and watching too many episodes of the Office. So, let's just thank Brenna again for making me put on real clothes and get out of the house and be social.
Let's get to know each other. I'll go first, since I'm already talking. I'm Allie (you knew that) and I live in Michigan. If you want to use Google maps to stalk me, Michigan is the one that looks like a hand and my house is in front of the pool filled with dark green, bacteria-breeding swamp water. Google caught us before we figured out the secret to keeping our pool water clean. I have two younger siblings and an adorable Shih Tzu puppy and a cat named Si that's out to get me. (As I write this, my mom's trying to figure out what to do about the Thanksgiving turkey that Si decided to taste test for us.) I'm a senior in high school at a little Lutheran school, where my dad is both my teacher and my volleyball coach. Kinda weird, huh? I'm pretty sure that there aren't a ton of teenagers whose dads have invaded their lives to that extent. (Jk dad, jk.) If your dad isn't your teacher, coach, doctor, dentist, UPS man, and nail technician yet, let me warn you: it starts slowly. When you least expect it.
For me, the ball got rolling my sophomore year of highschool when my dad landed a job as the 11th & 12th grade religion teacher at my high school. Just a teacher who, at the time, didn't even teach me. That's it. I could deal. By the summer after my junior year, my dad had somehow convinced the varsity volleyball coach to quit his coachship - whether by bribery, threat, brainwash, or a combination of the three I'm still not sure, but it was highly effective. My dad found himself interviewing for the position along with exactly one other very unavailable person. The whole time, I made it known in no uncertain terms that I didn't want my dad to coach me. The funny thing is that he'd coached me all through grade school and it had worked okay; in fact, I loved it. Once freshman year hit and my dad wasn't my coach anymore, I found that I simply could not practice well if he stepped in to watch. I'd miss serves, send passes right back over the net, and sometimes even spontaneously trip and fall over (I swear that happened.) I was worried about what he was going to say to me about what I was doing; I became inexplicably sensitive to what he said. It was completely irrational, because he never yells and he expresses himself in the most chill way possible, but I guess hormones happened or something. Three years of that and I was aggressively un-open to having my dad oversee every second of every practice. I wouldn't have it.
Well, you guys can guess how it goes. Probably because I told you up there somewhere. He got the job, and I started to figure out that I was going to have to reconcile what seemed like a lost situation in my mind. It was hard, at first. Along with the whole having-dad-at-practice complex, I was worried about having teammates disagree with the decisions my dad made, both in front of me and when I couldn't hear them. That happened. There was one day in particular, after a hard loss, when I walked into the gym and literally all conversation stopped. I worried about my not being open to my dad's way of doing things. It happened. I was resistant to change. I worried about conflict between our team and the former varsity coach. That came to a head in practice one day and left several of us in tears. I worried about losing. We lost more than we won. I didn't want my dad to be my coach because I knew it would complicate things, and I was right: it did. One way or another, all those complications snuck into the gym.
As the season wore on, I learned a lot of things. Every single "bad" thing about having my dad coach me ended up helping me grow. Hearing my teammates, their parents, and our former varsity coach disagree with my dad's choices after seeing his painstaking consideration firsthand made me more sensitive toward the people in leadership positions in my life. It's hard to be the one in charge, you guys! It's harder than following, and it's infinitely more difficult than being a spectator with an overgrown opinion. I realized the importance of communication, and I learned how to do it. After losing match after match after match, I got to experience the feeling of working hard for the eventual win. (And win we did.) I was forced to have a position, stick to it, and let disagreement hit me without pushing me over. All of those little things that I desperately tried to avoid made me better.
As I'm writing this, the whole season wrapped up together and blurred by a distant view, I'm learning that accepting the challenge is so much more than avoiding it. I've gained this affinity for things that are hard to do, that make me put in extra effort or throw me waaayyyy outside my comfort zone. I like stretching myself, because I know it helps me get better. My dad was my coach, and I didn't ask for it, but I reaped so many more benefits from what I didn't want than I would have from what I did - I'm sure of that. I think that I'll probably always be glad that I didn't get what I asked for. You might even say that I'm thankful! //
Thanks so much for reading along and sharing this with me! Happy Thanksgiving!
