I am currently the assistant dance coach at a local high school where I coach alongside my best friend Jenna. Whenever one of us can not be at practice we make sure the other can in order to obviously still hold practice. Sometimes if Jenna is not at a practice and I can not get ahold of her, I have to make decisions on my own. Being my second year coaching, I sometimes struggle with coming up with the right decision or most mature decision. Recently we had two athletes not show up to a practice on a Saturday morning. We use a demerit system so normally if this happens they receive three demerits for not showing up and not letting us know. Once an athlete has hit six demerits they are required to sit out of a performance.
As their coach I was torn on whether or not to pull these two athletes from their next performance as the biggest competition of the season is coming up. As a whole would it benefit the team to follow through with consequences or would it hurt the team for their next competition. Initially, I wanted to stick to the plan of no performing, but in order to not hurt the entire team for the mistake of two athletes, I allowed them to perform leading up to the competition but once the competition is over, they will be required to make up for. the missed practices.