Cut At Tryouts — Said In Front Of His Teammates
Tryouts produce a list of who made the team. They also produce, every August, a much longer list of players who decide whether to ever try out again.
He didn’t cry at the cut. He cried that he had to walk past the others to get his bag.
The list was posted on the wall outside the locker room. The names were in alphabetical order. His was not on it.
He was twelve. He had been at the academy for three years. He had, by all the metrics he understood, done what they asked — shown up to tryouts on time, played both days, played the position they put him in, played hard. He had also, three months earlier, been told by an assistant coach that he was a "lock" for the team. He had told his friends. He had told his mother. He had told the cousin in Texas who was supposed to come watch a tournament.
He didn’t cry at the list. He didn’t cry on the walk to the locker room. He didn’t cry as he opened his locker, took out his bag, and turned around to leave.
He cried when he realized he was going to have to walk past four of the boys who had made the team to get to the door.
This is the part of tryouts that nobody puts in the coaching textbook.
The technical part of tryouts is easy to write down. Run the drills. Run the scrimmage. Score the players against a rubric. Pick the team. There are hundreds of books and courses on how to do this part. Most of them are fine.
The human part of tryouts — the part where a 12-year-old finds out, in front of his peers, that the program he has spent three years inside has decided he doesn’t belong anymore — is almost never trained for. It is left to whoever is on duty when the list goes up. Sometimes that’s a director who has thought about it carefully. Sometimes it’s an assistant coach who is twenty-two and has never delivered bad news to a child before. Sometimes it’s no one. The list just appears.
The list is, for the player not on it, the worst piece of writing he will read all year. It is also, almost always, the first time he has been publicly rejected by an institution he loved. How that experience is delivered will, in many cases, determine whether he ever tries out for anything again.
There is a version of the same tryout that ends without the long walk past four teammates.
In that version, the cuts are delivered privately. Each player who hasn’t made the team gets a phone call — from the head coach, by name, the day before the list goes up. The call lasts seven minutes. It includes three specific observations about the player’s tryout, one sentence about what the player would need to work on to make it next year, one sentence about why the coach still thinks the player should play soccer, and a final sentence inviting the player to come back the following August.
There is no version of cutting a kid that doesn’t hurt. There is, however, a difference between a hurt that builds and a hurt that breaks.
The seven-minute phone call is a hurt that builds. The walk past the boys who made it is a hurt that breaks.
The reason most academies cut the way they cut — list on the wall, no phone calls, no private conversation, the player finding out by alphabet — is not malice. It is logistics. The head coach has thirty players to cut and twelve to keep, and the season starts Monday, and the call list is exhausting, and the parents will email anyway, and the player will figure it out.
The player will figure it out. The cost of letting him figure it out, in the parking lot or on the walk past the locker bay, is not zero. It is the cost of one twelve-year-old deciding, somewhere in the next forty-eight hours, that organizations that he showed up for didn’t show up for him. He may keep playing. He may not. If he doesn’t, he won’t tell anyone exactly why. But the moment will be in him for years.
A few sentences that change the cost:
- I want to tell you the decision before you read it on the wall.
- Here are three specific things I saw in your tryout.
- Here’s what I’d want you working on if you came back next August.
- I still think you should play soccer.
The phone call costs seven minutes per player. For a coaching staff cutting twenty-five players, that’s three hours of evening work. It is the most important three hours of the academy year, and almost no academy in North America budgets for it.
If you are a director, this is the easiest single change you can make to your program. There is no rubric to redesign. There is no app to buy. There is a list of phone numbers and a Tuesday night.
The kid who got cut and got the phone call is, in many cases, the kid who comes back next August. The kid who got cut and walked past his teammates is, in many cases, the kid who plays a different sport.
Both lists matter. Only one of them is on the whiteboard.
Keep players in the game.