The Spirit time-out is seen as the controversial “nuclear option”. If its called in a game everybody at the event will know about it and think about it (mostly) badly. But we have to change that mindset as a community because the spirit circle is a reasonable and appropriate choice to change some difficulties in a game.
If there are some difficulties in a game its important for a captain / coach to act to protect the game and the team. Active communication between captains will often resolve the issues. But if this isn’t enough its a good choice to take the spirit timeout. Its easier to spend 2 Minutes to talk to both teams about something serious that needs to change as everybody in the team gets the message from the captain.
What do you think about the Spirit time-out?
Should teams take it earlier?
How can we change the image of the Spirit time-outs?
I think we need to ensure we have “spirit captains” to help prevent escalations. however the spirit captains can also take on the role to ensure that a spirit time out isn’t seen as an “insult” but rather as an “opportunity”.
I think also the SUA could maybe talk about this topic in a newsletter to explain that this is part of the process. We all have seen soccer etc games that went totally off the rails … this is our process to prevent exactly that!
Originally my reaction used to be “oh no, a Spirit time-out happened”!
After talking with several people in the WFDF Spirit community I realised that it is better to use a Spirit time-out early to avoid a game from escalating than calling it late when emotions are already high.
Similar to calling a certain type of infraction early (e.g. Pick) instead of waiting for it to happen multiple time and start calling it late in the game. By that time you might already be in an annoyed state and at the same time the other side might consider it inconsistent to start calling now.
That being said I certainly hope that things could normally be worked out by the Spirit captains without a time-out.