Haha, suspending the coach a game for yelling at a player. What a dunce. Definitely in the running for D-Bag of the month.
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@LesBolstad: Haha ...
Well, in spite of
@LesBolstad (and perhaps others) saying haha, I suspect they didn’t get the joke.
In the interest of brevity, I had phrased the last paragraph of my last post in the form of a conditional expression, but incorporating a joke. Not a funny-ha-ha joke (as I find none of what the Athletic Department inflicted on Destiny to be funny at all).
Rather, a sarcastic joke (
https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/irony-satire-sarcasm). The (b) part of my (a)/(b) clauses was intended to be the sarcastic part. Obviously, nobody is going to suspend Whalen for a game for yelling at her player. That would be ridiculous.
The point I was trying to make via sarcasm, was that it is equally if not more ridiculous, for an athletic department to effectively suspend a player (e.g., Destiny Pitts) for the rest of the season, for “bad body language.”
Sorry I didn’t spell it out more clearly - maybe I was being a bit too clever. But if you explain the punchline in detail, then it ruins the joke.
The other part that I made too tricky, was that my entire last paragraph was in the form of a hypothetical conditional expression that was in essence a thought experiment about what better outcome might have resulted if things had been handled differently by the Athletic Department. As such, the only thing you can agree with or dispute is the hypothetical conditional statement per se. You can’t lambast the author of the clauses-within-the-conditional for merely including them within the hypothetical, because the author is not asserting those clauses unconditionally.
In fact, the author (me) does not believe that (b) would be a good idea; although I could potentially support (a) = the idea that Coach and Athletic Department might have suspended Destiny for one game in order to make their point.
In fact, I wish that had happened. If a one-game suspension had happened, instead of what really happened, namely an indefinite suspension coupled with refusal by Athletic Department and/or Whalen and/or Coyle to rationally discuss the matter with Pitts in spite of her multiple efforts to do so, then I believe with about 99.9% certainty that Destiny Pitts would still be with the Team (and that Pitts and Whalen would be on good terms). I simply cannot believe that Whalen’s original goal in attempting to apply some discipline to Pitts, was to effectively boot her off the team. That’s just not the Whalen I’m familiar with.
I’ll briefly restate my conjecture, that I can’t be certain of since we mostly have only probabilistic facts that only have a probability of being true or false (and we can agree to disagree on the probabilities). I conjecture that with very high probability, the Athletic Department (along with its apparently horrible disciplinary system, and perhaps even mismanagement by Coyle himself) is about 90% responsible for the eventual result of Destiny being put between a rock and a hard place with no reasonable way out, other than to quit via the transfer portal. I’ll let the rest of you argue about how to split the remaining 10% of culpability between Destiny Pitts and Lindsay Whalen.
A key premise in my argument has always been what is better expounded by @polli’s niece in post #258 in this thread. I believe that premise to be true with very high probability. What convinces me of that is Destiny Pitts trying unsuccessfully for three days to talk to Whalen (and I take Destiny on her word on that one - she has little to gain and everything to lose by lying). I can’t imagine Whalen being so cruel as to turn hard-hearted and absolutely refuse to talk with Pitts. The only alternative is that the disciplinary-system process per se forbad Lindsay from talking to Destiny (until, for instance, she signed an inherently unsignable document that took away what little rights she was granted in the first place). As @polli’s niece and I more or less conjecture, Whalen probably had no idea that by turning the discipline over to “the formal disciplinary system,” she was launching a runaway freight train effectively leading unavoidably to the ejection of Pitts from the team. On paper, Destiny’s leaving was a free-will choice by her. But I call it an effective ejection, because Destiny was left no other viable choice by the system, other than entering the transfer portal.
My best analogy is: Destiny was the spark. Lindsay was the fuse, which was lit by Destiny’s spark. Once the fuse was lit, Lindsay took it to the Athletic Department and asked what she should do to administer discipline. They told her to plug the lit fuse into the keg of disciplinary dynamite sitting in the corner. Boom. And Destiny is gone, after several days in a row of her acting maturely by making genuine (but unsuccessful) efforts to talk to, and work things out with a juvenile-acting Athletic Department that accused her of “bad body language.”
