If you are a male hockey player and you invest a huge chunk of your life in the pursuit of a career as a professional hockey player and you reach a fairly high level– say, Junior A– and then one year you don’t make the team, how would you describe what happened? I think you probably say you had been cut. You couldn’t make the team. You couldn’t keep up.
I just heard the author of “Various Positions”, Martha Schabas, describe how the same thing happened to her when she was around 15, and a student at the National Ballet School of Canada. I thought it was interesting that she didn’t use the word “cut”. She said she was “kicked out”.
Call me sexist if you like: I don’t think a male would use that term to describe what has happened when you are no longer good enough to make the team. That’s the phrase you might use if you wanted to indicate that you had broken a rule, or had a fight with an assistant coach, or failed a drug test or something: you got kicked out. If you were removed from the team because you weren’t good enough, however, you were just “cut”.
For the record, I don’t believe all girls would use that phrase either.
“Kicked out” implies that you were part of a group, the in-crowd, an association of like-minded individuals with a mutual self-interest. And then, outrageously, you were “kicked out”. Excluded. Unjustly deprived of membership.
Incidentally, Martha Schabas’ book, “Various Positions”, is about “Georgia”, a 14-year-old ballet dancer who lusts for and seeks sexual relationships with adult men. Without, apparently, the disapproval of the writer/narrator.
A number of reviewers on Goodreads complained about that. But I suppose she could argue she is just describing reality, and the reviewers are being politically correct.
The title, by the way, obviously alludes to a Leonard Cohen album by the same title.
The coach of Canada’s national women’s hockey team, Shannon Miller, once cancelled the team Christmas Party because she didn’t like their attitude during or after a loss to the Americans.
I will never understand why the players didn’t simply announce that they would have the party without Shannon Miller. What would she do? Call the police?
Kick them off the team?
Well, maybe. Shannon Miller would have cut the ring-leaders from the team. If you would have asked her if that was fair, I don’t think she would have been troubled by the issue at all: they were disloyal. Membership on the team is a favor bestowed by me. That’s enough.
I frankly don’t believe it’s likely that a very good player would make the team if she did not at least pretend to hold the coach in high regard.