Just before the start of the 2021 baseball season, the Los Angeles Angels suspended their pitching coach.
- Why do you think a team would suspend a coach? (Answers will vary: students may guess that he wasn’t good at his job or had made poor choices.)
- If you were a coach looking forward to the coming season, how might you respond to the suspension? (Complain, say it is not fair, get angry, claim the allegations weren’t true, etc.)
Share the following video [0:47]:
Angels Suspend Pitching Coach Mickey Callaway Over Alleged Lewd Behavior
Pitching coach Mickey Callaway was suspended in the spring over reports of bad behavior and harassing women.
- What do you think of the way Coach Callaway handled the situation? (Accept all reasonable responses.)
It could have been easy for the coach to blow up in anger or deny all the claims of bad behavior. Instead, he was willing to provide more details about the situation at hand.
- What can we learn about handling correction? (We can have a teachable attitude, rather than a defensive one, when it comes to correction.)
- When has your response to correction kept you from something good or led to even more correction? (Answers will vary.)
- Why is it sometimes hard to have a good attitude when corrected? (Answers will vary.)
Even when the person correcting us cares about us, our first response to correction may be defensive. Let’s find out how someone responded to God’s correction and what that outcome tells us about the benefits of finding the right attitude when we are corrected.