The original post: /r/amitheasshole by /u/mangocake246 on 2024-10-12 19:36:49.

So there is this bi-annual coding competition at my school that allows up to 3 people per team. For the past two years, I have teamed with two of my friends (we’ll call them Ava and Bella). In these two years, I and Ava have always spend a huge amount of time outside of school preparing, while Bella has always been busy with things such as volleyball competitions and schoolwork (for classes that Ava and I are also in, but we still manage to make time for this competition), and has not had much time to meet up with us to get ready. Whenever we are doing anything and apportion some of the work and preparation to her, she always tells us that she will, but then doesn’t because she says she has too much homework and too many tests, and will do our competition work later.

However, despite Bella’s lack of time spent into this competition, she has not been completely indifferent. She still shows up to the final competitions and works hard during those competitions, and does some of the practice I mentioned earlier eventually (in a rushed way however, after we’ve asked her multiple times). Overall, she is a nice person and seems like she genuinely wants to be on this team, she just doesn’t take this seriously enough like Ava and I. I would say because of this, our team has never placed very well in the final rankings since we have been more of a two person team rather than a three person team.

This year, Bella talked occasionally about how her workload this year has been even more overwhelming than last year, and that she wasn’t even fully sure if she could commit to the competitions this year anymore. However, whenever she said that, she quickly changed her mind to still being able to compete later. Even though she said that, we knew that the problems from last year and the year before that would only get worse.

Then, Catherine, who is another friend, lost her team because they dropped out due to scheduling conflicts, so Ava and I decided to kick Bella out and invite Catherine into our team instead. We didn’t want to break off our friendship with Bella, since we like her as a friend, just not as a teammate, so we tried to kindly push Bella to drop out without directing asking her if she could drop out by emphasizing the time commitments needed and that she couldn’t meet that commitment. She seemed very unhappy though, and kept saying that she could still do the competition and would spend time outside of school, but we had trouble believing that since we have asked her countless times the previous years to spend more time and she never did despite agreeing to.

Because of this, and the fact that the deadline was extremely close, I ended up just registering our team with Catherine rather than Bella before Bella fully agreed to dropping out. When Bella found this out, she was extremely upset about how we replaced her without even getting her approval, and now glares at me whenever she walks past me, not responding to any of my text messages either.

AITA?