The car ride home
Pick what just happened. Get three things worth saying, one to leave alone, and why it matters.
What just happened?
She got dropped
Silence for the first ten minutes is fine here. She knows. You know. Nothing you say in the car park improves it.
Any sentence that starts with "if you'd just…" — even if it's true, especially if it's true.
Selection disappointment is one of the loudest signals in junior sport, and the temptation is to fix it immediately. She isn't ready to problem-solve yet. Offering her the choice hands back the bit of control she just lost.
She played badly
She's already run the review. Yours is the second one she's had to sit through, and it's the one she can't escape.
Listing what went wrong. She was there.
One specific, true, positive observation does more than any amount of analysis. If you can't find one, the weather and dinner are perfectly good topics — the message is that your interest in her isn't conditional on the scoreboard.
She was brilliant
This one seems easy and it's where a lot of dads accidentally do the damage.
"If you play like that every week you'll make the rep side." You just turned a good day into a new expectation.
Praising the effort and the enjoyment is repeatable. Praising the outcome makes the next ordinary game feel like a failure. Asking her to explain a decision tells her you saw her thinking, not just her stats.
Someone upset her
Deal with your own anger before you open your mouth. She'll read it instantly, and if you're furious she'll start managing you instead of telling you what happened.
Promising to sort someone out. It shifts the problem to her — now she's worried about what you'll do on Saturday.
Ask before you act. If she says leave it, you can still raise it with the league quietly — but tell her that's what you're doing. Going behind her on this costs you the next time something happens.
She was umpiring
Being upset by what gets yelled at them is the main reason young officials quit, and it usually comes from adults.
Relitigating the decision. Whether she got it right is irrelevant to what just happened to her.
Umpires are trained to accept dissent as part of the game, which means she may not think what upset her counts as anything worth reporting. Ask the league what its escalation process actually is — most have one, and most young umpires have never been told about it.
She's gone quiet
You will not get it out of her in the car. The car is the wrong room, even though it's the room you're in.
Repeating the question in different words for twenty minutes.
Cars are good for hard conversations precisely because there's no eye contact — but only if she starts it. Leave the door open and let the silence be comfortable rather than an interrogation with pauses.
She wants to quit
Fourteen is when Australian girls leave sport in the greatest numbers. Take it seriously, but don't take it as final.
"After everything we've spent on it?" — she'll stop telling you things, and she'll still quit.
Wanting to quit is usually about a specific thing: a coach, a teammate, a training time, being the only girl. If you can find the specific thing, it's often fixable without her leaving the sport.
She's nervous before a game
The drive to the game matters as much as the one home, and it's easier to get right.
Last-minute technical advice. She has a coach, and you're adding load at the worst possible moment.
Your job in this car is to lower the stakes, not raise them. Normalising nerves and naming something pleasant on the other side of the game shrinks it back to the right size.
Some things aren't a car conversation
If what she's dealing with involves her eating, hurting herself, or the behaviour of an adult at the club, don't work through it with a script. Talk to your GP, or contact your state's sporting integrity or child safety officer — every association has one. Kids Helpline is 1800 55 1800, and it's free, 24 hours, for both of you.
Written by dads who've got it wrong plenty of times. It's a prompt, not a script — you know her and we don't.
Add it to your phone
Open this page on your phone, hit share, then Add to Home Screen. It'll sit there like an app and open in one tap — which is the only way you'll ever actually use it in a car park.