Turn up for the team that is losing
Supporting anything is easy when it is going well. The useful attendance is in a bad season.
The BeingKind editorsPublished How this is written
Why it lands
Amateur clubs collapse in the year everything goes wrong — the results, the committee, the weather — and collapse is usually a slow attrition of people who each individually stopped coming. Numbers are the whole game: a team with eight players folds and one with twelve survives. Being one of the ones who kept turning up is the entire contribution, and nobody will ever describe it as kindness.
How
Commit to the season rather than to the good weeks. Turn up when it is raining and you are losing, which is when the count actually matters. Bring someone else, since one extra person is a substantial percentage of a small club.
Related
Tell someone what you actually earn
Pay secrecy is maintained by people like you staying quiet, and it costs the people with least information the most.
5 minutesFreeA friend
Ask what the hardest part actually is
We assume we know which part of someone's situation is worst, and we are usually wrong.
5 minutesFreeA friend
Notice the deadline someone is drowning in
People rarely ask for help at work because asking reads as not coping. Offering removes the admission.
An afternoonFreeA friend
Say the spare room is available before they need it
People leaving bad situations often have nowhere to go for two nights, and cannot bring themselves to ask.
5 minutesFreeA friend1 person did this
Scan the box of photographs
Boxes of prints are one house fire or one house clearance from being gone. Scanning them takes an afternoon.
An afternoonFreeA friend