It has been five days since Millie, my >15 year old labrador / springer spaniel mix – that’s >110yrs old in dog years – has had an “output incident” (translation: she pooped inside). That’s pretty good for such an old dog. We’ve made accommodations in her age, making sure she has access to the outside basically all day, we adhere to a strict schedule of breakfast, treat, dinner, treat, and bedtime, with a short late afternoon walk (to avoid the heat of the day, it’s summer here in Dublin) and a pre-bedtime walk, usually around 10pm, to have that final chance for relief before settling in for the night.

As a conscientious dog owner, I pay attention to these things. She deserves nothing less. I understand she’s old, we can make changes to help her out, she never gets scolded or yelled at for being who she is, we clean up the mess and are happy she’s generally healthy and happy.

Apparently, our softball league prefers a different approach. Believe me, it wasn’t easy making the connection to the maintenance of the odd “oops I did it inside” nature of an old dog, and how a softball administration handles discontent surrounding impulsive player and umpire behavior. Instead of directly, transparently, and honestly following a process to handle disputes in a fair and open manner, our league prefers to issue vague messages about “sportsmanship”, scold the membership for having opinions the league doesn’t like, and leaves everyone confused, bemused, and annoyed in equal measure.

Was it me or my team? Was it a game in which I was involved? Was it outside of any game, and part of a post-game discussion, about the continual state of poor umpiring (to be expected in a recreational softball league where we’re all quite unathletic at this point in our lives), the league suffers under incompetent administration (beyond what could be considered achieving the bare minimums, as they don’t even have access to their own bank accounts), and even worse levels of communication (as we will see).

Why is a sport league committee poking their nose into what seems like a personal bitch session between players? “People are gonna complain”, it is inevitable. The league probably shouldn’t have gotten involved at all, but they did; and doing so by chastising the membership for voicing opinions amongst themselves, with the only solution offered being a reminder for everyone to “show respect”. There was no identification of who, or what, exactly was the issue, just a preachy missive about how one team sent a message to another team to complain about something, and the league doesn’t like that, and yadda yadda yadda … sent to team captains, who had to forward it on to players, raising more questions than it answered, and causing more problems than had existed previously.

Child, please. If Millie poops in the kitchen during the early hours of the morning, I clean it up. We go outside and hopefully she’ll do more, but outside. She’s a good dog, she’s not trying to poop in the house – it’s just what happens when you’re an old dog. We accept that, deal with it, give her the opportunity to poop outside as much as we can, but sometimes there are accidents. In the meantime, the kitchen floor gets periodically hot-mopped and disinfected.

Same thing here: if players are annoyed with something they feel stinks, offer them a way to fix it. Currently, emails to the league go ignored, ethical breaches and cheating scandals are actively hidden, and a “don’t mention the war!” cover-up mentality is the status quo. Now they want to stifle private discourse? Good luck with that. There’s nothing you can do to stop people from gossiping and talking about things amongst themselves, or having an opinion. “Clean it up” doesn’t mean yelling at them to stop. It is unavoidable, and must be accepted. How you deal with it, is a choice.

But since the league made this an issue by lecturing us all about what they consider “bad sportsmanship”, they are now obligated to provide clarity about who did what and if there are consequences. Provide a way to fix this, by being open, honest, and transparent. This has been an impossibly high bar for the league to achieve in the past, and I’ve no expectation of them achieving the bare minimum here either – so in the absence of a real solution, the league can stop criticizing people for having an opinion, and mind their own business, like getting access to the league bank account.