The Intersection: Where Sports and Social Work Meet

I attended a magnet school for performing and visual arts in high school.  We always joked that our stands were packed on Friday nights to watch the halftime show, not to watch the football game (for real, though, our band was lit, if marching bands can be such a thing).  I was also the second graduating class, so our population was lower than most schools in the area, and I think that also led to our sports being not great.  I joined the swim team and the soccer team along with a number of other choir nerds, band and orchestra geeks, musical theater and drama fanatics, and some visual art peeps.  Needless to say, we rarely went .500 in a season.   My junior year, we got a new soccer coach.  Coach V was a young (late 20s) math teacher from Maryland who had D1 golf experience, but who had played soccer most of her life.  She held a meeting with all the girls who were interested in playing and our parents, and gave off an air of actually knowing what she was doing (as opposed to the coac

"That's perfect!  Great work!"   "Awesome.  Total perfection!" "Practice makes perfect." "Perfect practice makes perfect." Maybe we've heard or said these statements in the past.  No harm, no foul, right?  The way I see it, not exactly.  One of my students wrote something in a discussion board post this semester that really stuck with me, and I hope it does with you too:  Impact > Intent.  If you remember from 4th grade math, "the alligator eats the bigger number".  So in this case, impact is greater than intent.  That means that no matter what you MEAN when you say something, it could have a very strong, unintended, impact.   Alright.  So where exactly is perfection in all this?  Well, perfectionism is really problematic because it is the thing that deters us from taking risks.  And all of us, particularly those who identify as female, have been praised by our parents and teachers for being quiet, staying in our seats, raisi