Read On a Scale from Idiot to Complete Jerk for Free Online

play with them, and it’d be an all-jerks league. Sports are fun, and lots of nice non-jerks play them. But the purpose of this whole project is to seek out and analyze the bad behavior (see title of science project), so we’ll focus on the jerks.
    A) Players
    1) Opposing Team Members
    Most of the time, it’s fun to imagine the other team as a bunch of jerks. It helps stir up the wanting-to-beat-them feeling. It’s what any decent rivalry is based on. Sometimes, however, the other team really is a bunch of jerks. Take the Violet Mahoney Junior Boys basketball team in our school’s league (the Vile Baloneys, as we have cleverly nicknamed them). While my school team wanders out to warm up in mismatched shorts and ancient jerseys that reach down to our knees, the Baloneys make even warm-up a performance. They explode into the gym with blaring music and slide straight into a very slick and complicated passing drill. They all wear new school sweat suits with their names on the back. Their uniforms fit them, and they all have expensive basketball shoes. They wear matching socks. Some of them wear shooting sleeves and LeBron headbands. We heave up random shots, try to minimize our enormous armholes and fight that sinking, intimidated feeling. We despise them.
    I’m not just being mean. They don’t only look like jerks. They really are jerks to play against. First—and this is what sucks the most—they’re really good. They beat us 107-16 last game. But I mean, come on! Right there, running up the score against a lousy team is a jerkish thing to do. It’s just rubbing it in. These guys were pressing and raining in three-pointers when they were up by seventy points. Second, their coach is a jerk. He screams a lot and argues every call, and the team just follows his jerkish lead. Third, it’s not just that the Baloneys are a jerk team as a whole. Each guy on the team is an individual jerk. They shove you when the ref isn’t looking, pull on your jersey, throw out a knee when they’re setting a screen and are generally cheap-shot artists. Especially number five, who usually guards me and who likes to throw an elbow. Just saying.
    2) Teammates
    Usually, your teammates are your friends. You work together, celebrate victories, overcome defeats, build team spirit, yadda yadda yadda. But sometimes even your own teammates can be total jerks. I’ve already given you the example from my hockey game, but there are lots of other examples.
    Take our girls volleyball team. I went to their season-opener game in the interests of science. Mostly nice girls, and they seem to get along pretty well. Except for…one girl. I’ll call her X. She ruins everything for that team. X is, predictably, a jerk to the other team, firing the ball at their legs under the net when they’ve won the point and get to serve again, clapping when they screw up and refusing to shake hands with them. Usual jerk stuff. But she’s also a huge jerk to her own team. The big eye roll or a loud “C’mon!” when a teammate plows a serve into the net, the shoving teammates out of the way to slam the ball over the net, the mean, hissed whispers…Yep, X is pretty much a textbook jerk. The coach, happily a non-jerk, didn’t put up with her for long and benched her. She sat out the last game of the match at the far end of the bench, many empty seats away from the other players. Just a tip—that’s usually the jerk zone.
    B) Coaches
    Okay, so I’m probably going to get in trouble on this one. But in the pursuit of scientific truth, I have to include a section on whether coaches can be jerks.
    Now, adults don’t generally like to criticize coaches, who are often teachers or parents who give up their weekends and evenings to hold practices and attend games and tournaments. My parents are always reminding me that coaches take time away from their own families and friends