boiling the hockey frog
Over the last five years, there've been some slow and steady changes to the club and the players in the club.
When I first joined, the club was smaller. It had a core of old friends who'd played together for a long time, and had young children still in primary school. They were the good-natured ribbing kind of friends, who'd known each other for a long time and were comfortable joking with each other. Now, those old friends are still there, but their kids are teens, in high school; they're held together with fondness, but they're separated by the lives of their children and their own careers.
Over the years, the women who've come in to play are...louder. Rowdier. The kind of women who think that pranking someone so they feel isolated and excluded is funny. The quieter, more...I'm going to say 'more honourable' players, have drifted away - mostly to motherhood, or they left after a rough year and never came back. What we have now is a core of women who don't really care about the rules so long as the system benefits them, who think nothing of calling our opponents names openly in social media, who think humiliation is 'funny'...
There's the old adage of the boiling frog. Dump a frog into boiling water and it'll jump right out. Dump a frog into cold water, and turn up the heat, and he'll sit there and boil to death.
I guess we're boiling to death, then.
When I first joined, the club was smaller. It had a core of old friends who'd played together for a long time, and had young children still in primary school. They were the good-natured ribbing kind of friends, who'd known each other for a long time and were comfortable joking with each other. Now, those old friends are still there, but their kids are teens, in high school; they're held together with fondness, but they're separated by the lives of their children and their own careers.
Over the years, the women who've come in to play are...louder. Rowdier. The kind of women who think that pranking someone so they feel isolated and excluded is funny. The quieter, more...I'm going to say 'more honourable' players, have drifted away - mostly to motherhood, or they left after a rough year and never came back. What we have now is a core of women who don't really care about the rules so long as the system benefits them, who think nothing of calling our opponents names openly in social media, who think humiliation is 'funny'...
There's the old adage of the boiling frog. Dump a frog into boiling water and it'll jump right out. Dump a frog into cold water, and turn up the heat, and he'll sit there and boil to death.
I guess we're boiling to death, then.