Curious what your gym rules are about missing practices and how strict the coaches are if there are frequent/repeated absences. I am one of those people that strongly believe if you threaten something, follow through. I am also a rule follower. This is a brand new team so first year for a lot of people. We all signed contracts back in June at the start of the season. No more than two absences allowed. Period. You come and watch practice if you are too sick to be on the mat. Most have adhered to this rule. A couple have not. One member just missed her FIFTH practice last night b/c she was sick and her mother refused to make her sit through a two hour practice if she wasn't feeling well. We have a big comp this weekend and the girls were not able to go full out. Really frustrating for all. I feel like if you sign a contract, then you know what you are getting yourself into. I also feel like if you are telling families they will be pulled from the team after two absences, you follow through or no one takes you seriously.
What is your gym's policy on absences? Do they follow through? Have you seen girls removed from the team for frequent absences?
This is why culture > rules
In cheerleading especially, it’s not easy to replace an athlete in most cases. Even if you have someone to fill the role for a practice, it’s rarely the same experience for everyone. That kid usually comes from a higher or lower level team and is either stronger than the normal person or less developed. Then as a coach you’re forced to make a decision based on severity of noncompliance between punishing the offender and punishing the rest of the team. You remove the offender and at a minimum the rest of the stunt group has to learn how to adapt to a new member and usually even more than that is affected. Formations usually have to change in order to maximize score because jump/dance abilities are different, etc.
Setting such concrete rules as saying, “no more than two missed practices or you’re off the team,” is setting you up for failure. “If you’re too sick to practice, come sit and watch,” isn’t a viable option either. These are “rules” implemented by a coach who wants to come across as a hard booty, but is really clueless. What if the kid developed a significant medical issue like suddenly being diagnosed as a diabetic, ending up in DKA, and has an ICU stay? Sounds over the top, but it’s happened twice in the last ten years at a program with which I am familiar. These are good kids with good families, and kicking them off the team is extreme when they’re going to be fine to come back as soon as their blood sugar is stable. People say “well that’s a special circumstance,” but if you have such concrete rules, there’s no place for “special circumstances” or you lose your credibility. “They can come watch” doesn’t work either in the case of the kids who’s third missed practice is influenza-related. As soon as other parents found out what the illness was, they’d raise nine kinds of hell about this kid sitting and watching and infecting their children, when all the kid and her parents wanted to do was save her spot.
In baseball, if I want to bench my starting shortstop for a game, I bench them for the game. The team feels the pain for a game, but I can put them back in for the next game. In cheer, because we practice daily and only compete a comparatively few times per year, it’s difficult to bench them for a competition.
Compounding all of the above is the notion in all stars that the athletes’ (read parents) are paying customers. That makes it even more of an obscure situation and difficult to compare to most main stream situations.
Rather than creating such hard and fast rules, coaches should focus on building a team culture where people want to be at practice so badly, that they don’t allow “sniffles” to keep them away. Then when a kid misses, the assumption is that something bad is wrong, not that they’re just blowing off practice.
