I know it drives me crazy we can never be happy and enjoy the fun experience, i once had a Minnesota fan tell me that if they dont win the national title he is disappointed and considers the year a failure! How do you derive any enjoyment with that outlook?
Yea, MN parent here....
....God is Great y’all!
Thank you for joining my TedTalk today.
Heather
(Proud mom of an exceptional human, CC McGraw)
Go, Gophers
I'm no Minnesota fan. I am a long time denizen of many forums since pre and post worldwideweb-Netscape. Before you had to have access to the internet, either as a student, a researcher, or some other involved method. You had to know esoteric commands and have the willingness and patience to navigate to where you wanted to go, so there were numerous natural barriers to entry to any discussion you ended up involving yourself in. Tim Berners-Lee changed that irrevocably, and in doing so he gave people an opportunity to congregate and bond in primordially necessary ways along lines that heretofore would have been impossible. With the magic of the internet and its broad availability, there is now a tribe for everyone, with all the positives and negatives that entails.
The dynamic being described here is one I've encountered 100s of times. Literally. Whether it's a player, a parent, a coach, a husband/wife of a coach, a son/daughter of a coach, another close relative or confidant, or an employee or relative of the team's/program's support staff.
While I am very sensitive to your heartfelt message written above, just as I've been sensitive to the other people I've encountered facing the same tension with a community of fans, in my opinion, it's important to describe why that tension exists, and why it will never go away entirely. More, I think it's damaging to the community to do anything to force it to go away. I've seen fan communities wither away to be replaced by another when too heavy a hand is applied.
Prior to the internet, communicating about our favorite teams tended to be only within a small circle. For the most intense of us, finding someone else who shared our interest at our level was not common, and discussing things with someone who didn't approach our level of interest often felt like a bit of a waste of time. I remember my first time stepping on campus at the University of Texas, and realizing that not everyone knew the entire history of the various sports teams, all the players being recruited and their vital stats, let alone how they matched up with upcoming opponents. Sharing my passion easily made me a killjoy and a sports nerd.
During this time, discussion about sports teams was called water cooler talk, except in baseball, where offseason speculation had its own term, the hot stove league. But again, it required people to be in close proximity, so the most passionate tended to be isolated individuals.
The WWW drastically changed this. Suddenly, those of us with the most intense interest could find our tribe. Not just the tribe surrounding our own team, but tribes involving other people's teams as well. Pay walls wouldn't be erected for another 5 to 10 years.
But these tribes were intended for the fans. There's a special torture the most passionate of us go through. To be a fan of a particular team is to invest one's identity in sometimes mentally unhealthy ways to an endeavor in which you have no control of. That helplessness is a key to what it means to be a "fan" or a fanatic, which is where the word comes from. The keys to a fanatic are a) being utterly helpless to affect the outcome b) having one's mood completely dependent on the outcome of a contest c) to unwaveringly back that team and that team only regardless of outcome.
It's part of the crux of our superstitions (best seen in DeNiro's character in Silver Linings). Wearing the right shirt, or following some other pattern of behavior, is key to our team's success. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not. The belief helps ease the complete sense of helplessness. It's also key to all our back seat driving or Monday morning quarterbacking. The idea we might be able to do a better job, or know a way to do a better job, if only we weren't completely helpless, is our way of coping with a fundamental aspect of being a fan.
A parent, coach, player, or someone close to one of the above is not actually part of this tribe. They think they are, but they are not. The coaches are mercenaries who are fans of whomever they're getting paid by. They are employees, not fans. They also have a very significant direct impact on what happens. That's not a fan. They have to regulate their response to outcomes for the very reason they have a direct impact in ways fans do not, because they do not have a direct impact. A coach cannot act like a fan and be successful, they cannot act like a fan because they're getting paid and will shift loyalties as soon as they're paid by someone else.
Players are not fans. They can become fans after their career is over. And yes, they will have a different perspective than a fan who never played, but they'll often subscribe to the very same behaviors - especially as the distance from the playing days lengthens, and the personal associations they had with the program/team wain. Often times it can make them even more critical, because there's a different sense of ownership and entitlement than a fan who didn't participate on that level feels.
Parents do not belong to the fan tribe, either. You belong to the son/daughter tribe. If your daughter were to suddenly transfer for whatever reason (this is COMPLETELY a hypothetical, and in no way am I suggesting this as a possible course of action) you would then become a fan of that team. Much of your fandom rests on the fact that your daughter plays for that team. You might be one of the exceptions where you were a fan of the team before, and maybe you'll remain a fan of the team after, but as long as your daughter is playing, you are a fan of your daughter first, and the team second. As her mother, that is exactly how it should be. But it means you are separate from the tribe represented on volleytalk, and your inability to recognize that is creating some dissonance that otherwise wouldn't be there.
I've experienced many heartbreaking dynamics, from recruits who were absolutely involved in being sold to the highest bidder who had close relatives insisting that wasn't the case, when it absolutely was, to coach's sons wanting to interact with other die hard fans when his father wasn't getting the job done and so the general fan base wanted him fired, to parents like you, only they're parents of children who weren't as good as the players backing them up, and fans loudly proclaiming it and detailing all the ways that was the case. It's horrific to watch.
But there's this general demand of people on the other side of the equation for fans to be constantly positive and supportive, regardless of outcome. To be aware of their potential audience, and to parse their words accordingly. I'm sorry, but that's being insensitive to our needs. We're not coming to VT to interact with players, parents, coaches. We don't expect it. That's not part of the value. I understand it occurs, but it occurs because those people seek out interactions with fans. Not the other way around. In this day of social media, there are all kinds of ways (frightening, in my old man get off my lawn kind of way) to interact with people you want to interact with. Subscribe to their instagram, twitter, whatever the new thing will be.
But people come to VT because they're volleyball fans, and they want to interact with other volleyball fans. The reason people leave is it can admittedly be a toxic environment. But guess what? Some of that toxicity is part and parcel with people passionately identifying with their viewpoint, and going overboard in trying to express it. You know why people continue to come back? Because there is simply no other place on the internet to have the same kind of robust active discussions about all of women's college volleyball. No where that's even close. Many of the same aspects of what produces that toxicity also produces the level of activity on here. You can't have one without the other.
As I said before, I've seen sites try to cater to the coaching staff, and parents/players of the team they identified with. Like Icarus, in their fandom they became too close to the people inside the program, and felt like their best way to support their favorite program was to enforce a positive environment on their forums. And those sites died and were replaced by sites where critical expression was allowed - in some cases to the extreme - as a reaction. If Volleytalk ever truly decided to make a heavy handed stand, I guarantee you another site would eventually pop up that would end up more successful. I don't foresee any of that happening, but it's an if/then statement.
I'll also say that in appealing to people's better nature, we're ignoring the fact that sometimes many of us find it fulfilling to be critical. The analogy I use is that as kids we loved playing with building blocks. And it was so much fun to stack them up high. There's a dopamine involved even as a toddler in the act of creating something. But it was also a lot of fun to knock the stack down in as explosive a way as possible.
All of us have both of those impulses. But while some of us enjoy stacking the blocks on top of one another more, some of us enjoy knocking the blocks down more. And we need both impulses as a human race, however much we want to deny it. Regardless of need, those impulses are there just as surely as the need to kick if our knee is hit in a certain place. It's not going away. And so appeal to people's better nature all you want. As you've described here, all it takes is one person to make a critical remark to completely deflate another person. Good luck trying to remove all derogatory remarks from anyone and everyone. Because it's not going to be done voluntarily. And if it's not done voluntarily, the consequence and mindset it creates is way more problematic than what it's trying to eliminate.
In conclusion, try to come to peace with this place as it is, not as you want it to be. Have some sensitivity for the role fans play. They will be here supporting their teams with the same level of passion (and, at times, toxicity) long after your daughter has left the program, making it possible for more daughters to have the same opportunity. Express your disapproval all you want, but realize it will never change who people are, or what they come to volleytalk for in the first place.
