Life is full of disappointments...

But nothing rates worse than judging your own girls in a competition, and having to -fairly- judge them low because they just aren’t doing as well as the other children…

And then, when we had a 1 in 4 chance of sending someone -anyone- of our 8 person team on, we didn’t so much as send a single representative.

In fact, we scored so badly that we didn’t even get a runner up… which was closer to a 1 in 3 chance…

That really sucks.

Boy, I really feel like I let my team down... I know it's not my fault, and you can tell me that all day long, but it won't change the way I feel.

There were kids there who were talking to us (The English teachers) in English, and carrying on complete conversations! Something that none of my girls could actually do. They were asking questions about where we were from, what school we went to, how long we had been in Japan (One asked about my cats… and wanted to know what color they were, how old, etc). My poor girls didn’t stand a chance.

They were simply outclassed in every way.

The look of disappointment on their faces, though, was enough to make me want to pack it up and go home… It’s awful to lose a competition, it’s worse when, at the awards ceremony, when the 8 winners and 2 runner ups are standing at the front of the room, getting their awards, you look around and realize there are empty seats in every school except ours. And you can see that my team saw that too…

This is compounded by the fact that I’ve never judged before, and I got the rules on what we are judging, about 15 minutes before I had to judge… The rules would have been terribly useful to have two months ago when I started coaching…

Well, trying not to dwell on the present, I’ve already begun to talk smack with the other two ALTs (Who are from Halifax, Nova Scotia and Taos, New Mexico) about taking them down next year (one of them is my neighbor here in my apartments, and the other is in my Japanese class, so I actually see them often, and we get together regularly). And now that I have some idea what the competition is looking for I can start working now to get a team together that will take on the other schools…

Well, life is full of disappointments, next year, though, it’d be nice to put at least one kid to the next level of competition.

---Me.