Middle School Misery

A quick note on our fundraising lacrosse clinic: middle school girls are either horribly miserable or incredibly wonderful. There is no in between, and they sure don’t care. While the wonderful ones are a million times better to work with, the misery ones are much better to tell stories about.

Exhibit A: Mom drops off a tired, cranky, disheveled looking girl 15 minutes before registration starts. She asks if it’s okay; I look at my watch, consider, and sigh, “I guess so. I’m here.” What that really meant was, “What are you doing on Saturday, at 8:30am, that is so important you have to strand your daughter, early, who is already miserable, with someone who can’t even pay attention to her because she has to set up the entire clinic in ten minutes by herself because her partner got lost in Cambridge and is coming late?” And of course this girl hasn’t pre-registered, as the flyer and accompanying forms blatantly stated, and of course she has cash, which I hadn’t even thought about (because people were supposed to send in checks ahead of time) and therefore don’t have change for. At least the mom was in such a rush, and so rude, that she threw the money down and said “Oh, keep the change” and she slammed the door on her way out. Bonus $15 for me. Not-so-bonus dark-looking 7th grader brooding, slumped over in a chair, and staring at my every move for ten minutes until the next (early) girl comes in.

Exhibit B: This girl doesn’t even wake up until 11:55, when we clean up and stretch at the end of the session. I don’t think she said one word the entire morning, and I had to read her name off her name-tag every time she said it because she mumbled so much under her breath and looked the other way, bored, that I couldn’t even understand, or try to lip-read (which I am not even skilled at) the first letter or any sounds in it. Her bangs are in her eyes, which isn’t exactly conducive to seeing the lacrosse ball coming at her, and is definitely a sign of a totally apathetic, and thusly useless, athlete, but she doesn’t care one bit. When we play games, she walks, or asks to sit out, or just stands still and watches the ball bounce right next to her instead of at least pretending to care for her team’s sake. Thanks for your money, sweetheart; I would kick you outta here if I had the guts.

So anyway, it was a successful and fun clinic and we raised over $800. Don’t get me wrong, I’m psyched about the results and had a good day of lacrosse. Also, most of the girls were perfectly kind and hard-working—totally awesome, really—and learned something from playing lacrosse all morning. But I certainly was reminded of how interesting it can be to work with middle school girls. Thank goodness I was a lanky, dorky, bookish, unfashionable, totally clueless pre-teen because I wouldn’t want to know I was like some of the girls we saw yesterday. Yikes! I did have a sort of mid-life crisis about not being popular in 6th grade, but at least I wasn’t one of the girls my teachers and coaches had to tell stories about in the mysterious teachers' lounge, where they probably stood around drinking martinis and doing evil things to voodoo dolls of their students. At least that's what I do in the teachers' lounge.