Limpag: Being on time

MY friend Bob Guerrero, a football, basketball and billiards commentator, wrote on Twitter the other night, “Disrespecting people’s time is disrespecting people” and it’s something that I wholeheartedly agree. It’s a lesson I learned when I was a young athlete, ingrained by a coach whose call time we didn’t really honor before that lung-busting session.

He was just a teacher assigned to football we all told ourselves, so we pretty much trained ourselves. That changed after the coach--who eventually transferred and became another school’s principal—joined a football seminar.

He didn’t berate us when we were late as usual for a Saturday practice. Sounding off wasn’t the style of the soft-spoken coach. Instead, he told us that things were going to change, for every minute we were late for practice, we had to run once around the field. And I tell you, after 20-plus rounds around the field the first time out, we were all in the field minutes before call time in the next scheduled practice.

He didn’t say much but his actions taught us,”Being late means not only disrespecting your coach and your teammates, but yourself also.”

Over the years, I’ve seen coaches try to instill the same message by various means.

Players who are late, no matter their value to the team, get benched or get punished. I remember seeing one coach benching almost his entire first 11 to teach them a lesson, and I laud coaches like that. It means they give more importance to teaching values than notching wins.

And values we all need.

And over the years, too, I’ve learned that unfortunately some of the people who disrespect athletes’ time are those who have no idea what it is like to be an athlete. I’ve seen athletes endure long hours under the sun, standing in line while listening to out-of-touch politicos drone about voting the right people even if the athletes aren’t of voting age.

Sure, not all coaches and athletes learn to value time but it is fortunate that in the world of sport, there’s a mechanism that makes sure such coaches will remember to value time.

It’s called the grace period. And curiously, it is something that coaches who value time don’t really put into factor and coaches that don’t value time put much factor on.

Simply put, the grace period is that amount of time given to tardy coaches and teams before they are forfeited in a match.

And after the grace period is over, it’s an automatic loss.

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