When someone gets cut from the team, the leader who talks to them afterward is the one they remember.

Getting cut is a small private grief that everybody else treats as a logistics outcome. The hardest part is usually not the decision but the silence afterward, the sense of having been quietly deleted from a group you were in last week. Somebody going to find them changes what the whole experience was, even though it changes nothing about the result.

If this happens near you, go and talk to them within a day or two, and go without a lesson to deliver. Say you were sorry to see it, and mean it. Ask them along to something, if there is anything to come to.