This week was our second ever Varsity tryouts. We had a great crowd of players. One team is still being decided (we had so many people tryout for one game– my-oh-my!), but I’ve sent out the congratulations and “sorry, you didn’t make it” emails to the other two teams.
If you played sports in high school (or college) you know how these moments can be bittersweet. One of the players on our Hearthstone team has grown from being good-but-not-great into an amazing player. It was awesome to get to tell him he made the squad. A number of people were who we thought they were, and so far, we haven’t had anyone who returned from last year not make the cut (though I don’t want anyone to read that as us favoring our old players– a number of people didn’t come back and a few graduated). But as is always the case with skills-based decisions, not everyone can make it.
I understand this feeling very well. For one thing, I’m a writer and an academic– two places where rejection and cutthroat climbing to accolades and positions is just rampant. I went through the angry gauntlet of applying to not just undergrad, masters and PhD but also law school. And I’ve sent a number of things out for publication review. Lots of rejections. Lots of victories, too, but also lots of rejections.
But before that, I played basketball. And it took me three attempts to make a roster in high school, then once I made one, I destroyed my knee (this story is elsewhere on this blog). So I know that disappointment.
I used to compare it to looking for a prom date. You put yourself out there, and then you’re there, exposed, easy prey, until you hear the response.
Because I know how it feels, and I’ve gotten everything from the smug waitlist letter from Stanford Law (which actually included a sentence about hoping that if the news was too difficult to take they hoped I had someone to talk to) to the clinically efficient “Thanks, but we chose someone else” note, I try to make my “you didn’t make the cut” letter exactly what it should be, a short letter that says “thanks” and “but you weren’t one of the best players.”
So far I’ve only had one person protest, which is par for the course. There’s always someone in a batch of rejections that wants to fight about it. I get that.
But what I wanted to share is the thing that the person who wants to complain never gets to know, I think. On each of the three teams that we tried out, there was at least one student I knew– in a couple of cases students I advise and know very well– that didn’t make the cut (or in the case of the last team look to not make the team). The decisions on those cuts are made by myself and two of my colleagues/friends. They know that I hold certain students in high esteem.
But those students who I like– who I care about and want to see succeed–still got cut in the cases where they weren’t good enough.
I think that when people get cut from a team or rejected from something they tend to think it was a personal thing. Trust me, as one of the directors of a major Varsity team, I can tell you it’s absolutely not about anything personal. And it doesn’t mean that a player is bad if they get cut.
We had an amazing crop of tryouts.
I’m excited for our year, but I’m a little bummed that I had to see a few of my favorite students fail to make their respective teams. It’s life, though, and I know they’ll understand.
There is, after all, no crying in Esports.