[NEW] Casey and the Cold Shoulder

Hi! My name is Casey and this is my story.

I play on a neighborhood soccer team called the Grover Street Wolves, and I have a VERY bad habit of being a sore loser.

Last spring, my team had our biggest game of the season. We were tied with the Elm Park Eagles, and my teammate Dominic missed a penalty kick in the final minute. We lost.

I was furious. On the walk home, Dominic tried to talk to me. 

"Hey, I'm really sorry about—"

"Don't," I said. And I walked faster.

At practice the next week, I refused to pass the ball to Dominic. When the coach paired us together for drills, I did them without saying a single word. When the other guys invited Dominic to hang out, I never showed up.

I wasn't yelling at him. I wasn't calling him names. I was just done with him. And I made sure he knew it.

A few weeks later, I had my own nightmare game.

I tripped over my own feet trying to defend my team’s goal and fell flat in front of everyone. The ball sailed into our own net.  Even worse, we lost by one point. It was all my fault. No one else could be blamed.

I sat on the bench after, my vision turning blurry, I couldn’t look at anyone. I waited for my teammates to come over. To say it was okay. To say anything.

Nobody came.

They weren't being mean, exactly. They simply remained in their own conversations, drifting away from me, toward the parking lot.

I felt completely alone on that bench. Small. Like the worst person in the world.

Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up.

It was Dominic.

"Those things happen," he said. "You're still the best midfielder we've got."

I didn't deserve his kindness. Not even a little. And we both knew it.

I thought about how I had treated him after his missed kick, how I had iced him out for weeks over one mistake: the same kind of mistake I had just made. 

In that moment, I realized what Dominic had probably felt when I had ignored him: the same sick feeling I was feeling right now. And I was the reason why he felt that way.

"Dominic," I said. "I was really awful to you. I'm sorry."

He shrugged. "I know. It's okay." And he meant it. He went on, “I believe in treating people how I want to be treated, even if they’ve been mean to me in the past.”

It took sitting on that bench, feeling invisible, to understand what I had done. I already knew how it felt. I just hadn't thought about it from his side until it had happened to me.

From that day on, after experiencing how it feels to be on the other side of poor treatment, I carried myself with the advice: “Treat people the way you want to be treated.”

THE END