This was a difficult situation to process and I am sure this sentence is extraordinarily biased and we'll never get to the bottom of it but we had a tune-up tennis match today against Monroe-- a giant Group IV school with a county champion first singles player-- which our team was treating as a practice for the State Tournament (we got lucky and have a decent bracket!) and it was a no-worries-let's get some practice kind of match because we knew we would get slaughtered but Monroe was missing their first singles player (he was playing in a tournament down in Virginia Beach) so my son Ian was playing their second singles player, who was still much better than him in UTR rating, and while the rest of our players went down quickly, Ian took the lead on their player-- and things were a little weird because this was the Monroe kid's first match at first singles and all his friends were on the fence cheering him on and then something strange happened-- the assistant coach (yes, this school is so big they have an assistant coach for tennis) came over to me and said that he heard our first and second singles players using profanity and he told my son to stop cursing and my son told him to "shut up" and so I stopped both matches and told Ian and Ethan to stop using profanity and then I pointed out to them that this young guy-- who looked like a student manager-- was an assistant coach-- which neither of them realized-- and Ian told me he didn't tell the assistant coach to "shut up," he told the kids who were clapping when he made on error to stop-- and then I watched and saw the deal-- the kids on the fence were really excited that their buddy was getting to play first singles and they thought he had an easy win against a player from a tiny school-- but Ian had eye of the tiger today, and was not going to let that happen-- and I did have a few words for the assistant coach: why the fuck was he talking to MY players during a game about profanity? . . . you come to me first and let me deal with it, especially when they didn't know him from Adam-- and I explained to him that we play in a county park and our kids are used to telling adults to be quiet because we often have lots of them circling like vultures to get on the court-- but the other coaches were having none of my diplomacy and explanations and chit-chat-- they were downright weird and angry, but I think they really wanted their kid to get his first win at first singles-- a singular chance for him-- because they were vociferously rooting for their kid-- which is weird in tennis-- anyway, Ian closed out the match and won 6-4, 6-4-- despite some sketchy calls from Ian's opponent and while I'm not sure exactly what happened, I'm sure Ian and Ethan cursed-- as they are wont to do-- but I don't know why some assistant coach is wandering around acting as the profanity police, especially in a match that means nothing, but I guess this is good practice for States, when shit will get real.
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