You are on the bench. Again.

You’re not allowed to leave your position for any reason. You are under strict instruction to keep a certain pace. The brilliant tactic you put forth was put on the back burner. You want to work on your weaknesses, but are only leveraged for your strengths.

Sometimes, it seems hopeless. You feel like a pawn in someone else’s game, following orders and doing only what you’re told. Developing your own plan is not part of theirs. Objectively, you have had some success, but you think that you could achieve much more if the reigns were loosened a little (or a lot).

Strength in obedience?

Coaches and managers are generally useful people to have around. The good ones can see the big picture, while detecting even the smallest opportunities for improvement. They use these perspectives to help us – the athletes – develop into more than what we might achieve on our own. In team sports, they can make the whole more than the sum of its parts, by creating synergies among the squad that the individuals might not see. Perhaps at one point they were an athlete, and learned enough from that experience that we might benefit from it as well.

This often requires that they are given some degree of authority, and therefore require the trust – and often obediency – of the athletes. This necessitates some kind of contract between us and them, either formal or informal. And like any contract, we should carefully read the proverbial small print before signing on the line, and be willing to shake hands with our counterpart.

But coaches and managers are, as we are, often imperfect. They sometimes don’t communicate their big picture to us. They might not tell us why they think we should do certain things, and not others. They may limit our democratic influence so that their perfect master plan doesn’t get messy. They may lose track of our individual worth, for the sake of a collective goal – akin to not seeing the trees for the forest.

When we feel like a small cog in a big machine, our most important task is how to genuinely fulfill our reasons for doing sport. Are we going to be able to challenge our other Society members as best we can (as Postulate 6 asks of us), and they likewise, if we stay put? Are we going to better understand our fellow athletes if we accept our coach’s directives unfailingly? Or would things be better if we decide about them more independently?

How we answer these questions can all have very practical consequences for us as athletes. We might not get selected to a team, get time on the course, or even be welcomed into a certain group if we don’t follow the play sheet. We might be labeled as “difficult” or “uncooperative”. We might lose access to resources, knowledge, and other people that we trust.

Know when to say ‘no more’

It is therefore important to know the difference between being a “team player”, and being subordinated to lesser value. In the former, we contribute in a way that most benefits the team, which sometimes requires putting our personal development and aspirations aside. This is something that a good coach will be able to explain, and achieve consensus about. The results can be incredibly rewarding, as anyone who has been part of a tightly-knit team knows. Being subordinated, however, is about serving under a power structure where our own development and aspirations are not considered important enough. The coach or manager views us as a commodity, to be used as they see fit. We can be sidelined, excommunicated, or thrown out if we question their authority.

This does not adhere well to the first postulate: All are invited to the contest, and the invitation is permanently renewable. If a coach or manager decides you’re not to be invited, then they are treading on our perhaps most important principle. You, an athlete, need to stand on the field of play in order to challenge others. If some person is preventing you from doing this, then you need to make a choice: how to remove that person from the situation, or how to remove yourself from it.

Judge their character

We also need to consider if the person making the decisions is an athlete. Usually, the coach or manager is not on the field of play. We are. Does that mean they are members of our Society? The answer is often no. But they, like officials and other people that make sport happen, can be invited as honorable guests. It is in both our and their best interests that we are all reading the same pages when it comes to why we do sport. We then have to assess that person: would they adhere to any or all of the our postulates if given the choice? Do they have our Society’s best interests in mind? Do they want our Society to become more cohesive, independent, and successful? Or do they want to realize their vision of a society?

Postulate 9 states that only athletes – the practicing members of our Society – are allowed to determine their contests’ and their sport’s fate. According to this postulate, it is not possible as an athlete to be a subordinate to sport. It is only possible to be a creator and decider of it. We can, in certain cases, delegate that decision-making to others if we see that they might be able to take sport, and all its members, in a positive direction. But we need to be in charge of that delegation. Once we lose that authority, it’s not our Society any more. It’s someone else’s.

You can go your own way

Once we assess our guests’ character and intentions, we should know whether or not they are also cogs in the machine, or if they just want to pull the levers and press the buttons. We can then choose to be a cog in that machine, to assemble a different machine, or not to be a part of it at all. We are, in other words, the engineers of our Society. We may sometimes allow others to manage it, but if they don’t understand it, they’ll break it. We are responsible for giving them the proper instructions, and to see that they are followed – not the other way around.