A Letter To The Coach Who Took Away My Confidence

Hey Coach,

I’m writing you this letter two years after the last time I talked to you because I still think about you and the way that you made me feel, every single day.

Here’s a little bit of background information about me. Information that I really wish you would taken the time to know, before you tried to coach me.

I trained for basketball for four hours a day, five days a week, for the three consecutive years before I knew you. Basketball gave me everything. Self esteem, independence, it taught me how to work as part of a team, how to be athletic, and how to get up and train even when it was the last thing I wanted to do, and unfortunately, I put a lot of my self-worth into this sport.

I wish that you would have known that I went to countless training sessions, had one-on-one skill lessons with trainers, I played on multiple teams at once, I always did summer league and Hoopfest, and planned my entire schedule around this sport.

I wasn’t bad. I really, really wasn’t a bad player. I could have been great, and I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. I genuinely could have gone somewhere with this sport and I can’t help but wonder where I would be if I hadn’t had you as a coach.

You are ex-military, you should have known that you were in absolutely no position to be coaching young, impressionable girls. You are the most intimidating, unapproachable man who I have ever met and I know that you have a little daughter. I hope that you NEVER make her feel anything like you made me feel.

I remember you screaming at us for sometimes thirty or forty minutes after a game. You would scream at us for so long that the JV coach and the Assistant Coach would have to leave because they were so uncomfortable. And we were left trapped in a cement room with you.

I put in the work. I showed up to practice to work. I earned playing time. Yet, for some reason I was invisible to you. Players would show up to practices and games late or high and they would get to play entire games. These same players would spew negativity to younger players on the team. The environment was toxic to begin with and you sucked away any chance we had at ever becoming a real team.

Having you as a leader, made me feel more worthless than I have ever felt. You shredded all of my self-confidence, and destroyed my love of playing the game. Maybe if I had been stronger mentally, I would have been able to keep playing, but the four months that I spent trapped in a gym with you, I experienced some of the most degrading moments of my life.

I heard that the year after I played for you, things got even worse. I heard that at the end of games you would rank the players from most important to least important teammate. However, I did hear that you stopped yelling so much, so that’s good.

I saw you a couple of weeks ago at my brothers basketball game, and a feeling of pure panic and dread washed over me. I had to turn around and walk the other way because I didn’t want you to see me looking as scared as I felt.

You never actually broke me, but you made me cry, you made me regret having ever picked up a ball, you scared me, you burnt me out, you made me feel like I was nothing, like I was worthless.

But you never broke me.

You knocked me down, but I got up…slowly…like really slowly. It took me almost two years to recover; to get back the confidence, independence, and self-worth that you stole from me. But I got it back.

I know that you are not a terrible person or even a bad person. I also know that you should never coach high school basketball again.

You taught me the exact person that I never want to be as a leader and I took my experience with you and put it toward coaching junior high basketball instead of playing for you again. So, thank you.

Thank you for trying to coach us. Thank you for having passion for the game.

Thank you for showing me that I have more strength than I ever could have imagined.

Sincerely,

Reganne

#basketball #highschool #coaching #college #girlsbasketball