When you suspend a kid for this, you suspend his imagination. You suspend his ability to watch the best in the world and emulate them. You suspend his passion, his leadership, you suspend the reward for all the hard work and the moment of accomplishment. You also suspend the pitchers toughness, his resiliency, you suspend his character building moment by feeling sorry for him, you suspend the truth that greatness is hard and is to be earned. But really, you suspend any doubt that whomever thought this was excessive is themselves without all the qualities listed above, and that’s why they can’t understand it. Tell me…as an educator and a leader…what’s the teaching moment designed to be ascertained more deeply from the suspension? Frankly if I was an alumni of this place I’d work really hard behind the scenes fire the person responsible because it won’t take long for their lack of perspective to make another bad call! My teaching moment would be - “attitude is everything, and as a pitcher if I give up a homer I expect the hitter to be excited but I’ll hate you more if you feel sorry for me! Make the next pitch!” We want people that are strong enough to endure, less we build a generation of children who will be beaten by the adults being raised elsewhere in the world! I’d say “You’re fired because you don’t understand what it takes to achieve greatness and that’s evidenced by suspending a kid for achieving momentary greatness and you felt sorry for the other team! You literally felt wrong about every moment from every perspective! The homer builds confidence in the hitter and that should be celebrated and immediately offers the pitcher a moment to show resiliency to others and to himself, and the bat flip only heightens the moment for both of them! When viewed from the correct lens, a lens of mental toughness and passion, it’s easy to see that you as an administrator have very little perspective and shouldn’t be in a position to make this judgement call further. You’re fired because we are suspending our pursuit of averageness.”