A fair amount of coach/parent bashing goes on here, I'd like to throw out a few of my own experiences with what may be a pretty commonplace communication problem that what people say and what others hear them say aren't always the same. Two things I see contributing to this are parsing vs. listening, and hearing what you expected to hear.
One situation started because DD(and others) were hearing the constant message "you suck" at every practice. I knew this wasn't what the coach was saying, but engaged him in conversation precisely to make the point that this is what she was hearing(not mentioning the other kids), and that the message he WAS trying to send was being lost. I thought it went fairly well until I hear that the coach had told the team "she hates me", everything I said went to waste because just like the child I was talking about, he parsed meaning by only hearing pieces of what I said.
Another one was when I was talking to coach about DD being in a short slump. During the conversation, I made the mistake of saying something about hitting out of a slump being tough with only 2 AB's a weekend. His response "Well maybe I should take someone else out of the lineup so your DD can strike out more." I wasn't bitching about playing time while she wasn't hitting, but that's what he heard as soon as I was dumb enough to brush up against the topic of playing time.
I've seen parents come away from conversations with the coach believing their kid was guaranteed something when the words "try to" and "opportunity to get time at" completely failed to penetrate.
Typing is frequently no better, I've seen an entire team of parents upset about something the coach typed out on his phone in 3m, when they all read it wrong.
Not bashing or sermonizing, but it's easy to miss a few words and create a misunderstanding that can spiral pretty quickly.
One situation started because DD(and others) were hearing the constant message "you suck" at every practice. I knew this wasn't what the coach was saying, but engaged him in conversation precisely to make the point that this is what she was hearing(not mentioning the other kids), and that the message he WAS trying to send was being lost. I thought it went fairly well until I hear that the coach had told the team "she hates me", everything I said went to waste because just like the child I was talking about, he parsed meaning by only hearing pieces of what I said.
Another one was when I was talking to coach about DD being in a short slump. During the conversation, I made the mistake of saying something about hitting out of a slump being tough with only 2 AB's a weekend. His response "Well maybe I should take someone else out of the lineup so your DD can strike out more." I wasn't bitching about playing time while she wasn't hitting, but that's what he heard as soon as I was dumb enough to brush up against the topic of playing time.
I've seen parents come away from conversations with the coach believing their kid was guaranteed something when the words "try to" and "opportunity to get time at" completely failed to penetrate.
Typing is frequently no better, I've seen an entire team of parents upset about something the coach typed out on his phone in 3m, when they all read it wrong.
Not bashing or sermonizing, but it's easy to miss a few words and create a misunderstanding that can spiral pretty quickly.