It was a Wednesday last fall. We sat at the kitchen table after dinner and wrote our kid’s coach an email about playing time. We took our time on it. We softened the harder line. We re-read it twice before hitting send at 6:14pm.
At 6:23pm, the reply came in.
Thanks, will keep an eye on it.
That was the whole thing.
We read it again. Then a third time. By the time we sat down with our spouse, we had decided that the coach was annoyed, that he thought we were that parent, and that our kid would sit on the bench Saturday because of us. Our spouse, who is wiser than us in this category, said that seems fine? and went back to dinner.
This is an email exchange we’ve written some version of more than once. And every time, we make it bigger than it is.
The reply means what it says
The coach got our email between practice and dinner. He has 22 parents on this team, a few other teams, a job, and his own kids. He read what we sent. He wrote five words back. He went back to whatever he was doing.
Thanks, will keep an eye on it is exactly what he said. We’re the ones who heard you are paranoid and your kid will sit forever. That is not what he said.
The shape of the reply is not an emotion. It’s a Wednesday at 6:23pm.
What we eventually figured out
Long replies don’t mean a coach cares more. Short replies don’t mean a coach cares less.
The coaches we trust most almost always reply in three to ten words. They are not being short with us. They are being efficient with the seven minutes they have between dropping off their own kid and leaving for our kid’s practice. We learned this slowly. By the third or fourth time we sent a long email and got back a short reply, we noticed the pattern. The replies got shorter as the coach got more experienced.
What we don’t do anymore
We don’t write the follow-up clarifying email. We’ve sent it. The coach reads it. He gets a little annoyed. We get less of his real attention going forward, not more.
We don’t text our spouse a punctuation analysis. We don’t screenshot it to a friend. We don’t bring it up at Tuesday’s practice. Reopening a closed conversation is how a parent becomes the parent on a team.
We also don’t reply with our own thank-you. He doesn’t have time to read it. The exchange is done.
What we do instead
We watch the next two practices and the next game. We look for whether the thing we asked about actually changes. Most of the time, in some small way, it does.
If after two practices and a game we still see nothing, we send one short follow-up. Hi Coach, just circling back on the email from two weeks ago. Have you noticed anything? That is the whole follow-up. Specific. Brief. Not accusatory. Most of the time it gets us a real conversation in person, after Tuesday’s practice, in the parking lot.
That is when we get the answer we were looking for. Not at 6:23pm on a Wednesday.
The longer pattern
The parents who burn out on coach communication are the ones who keep reading tone where there isn’t tone. They send the follow-up to the follow-up. They escalate to the team manager. They post in the team chat. By March, they’re the parent the coach is screening.
The parents who last are the ones who eventually figure out that thanks, will keep an eye on it is a reply you can take. Not because the coach is being warm. Because the coach is being a person on a Wednesday.
We are still, some weeks, the wrong kind of parent on this. We send a thing at 9pm we shouldn’t have sent. We re-read a reply too many times. We invent a problem that’s not there.
But more weeks now, when a five-word reply lands in our inbox, we read it once. We say good, he saw it. We close the laptop. We finish dinner.
The win is in the not-spiraling. Our kid never knew anything happened. The coach never knew anything almost happened. The week kept going.
That is what we wanted from the email in the first place.