Viewpoint: Sometimes Losing Teaches You to Win
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Lori’s nephew spent some time with us last week.?He shared that his son and daughter, both in elementary school, are in the middle of basketball season.?We talked about sports in general and he assessed the abilities of his children and talked about the problem finding good coaches in the small community they live in.?Like many of us, he had a story of an adult coach acting like anything but an adult.
?It reminded me of the first time my son went out for wrestling.?At his very first practice he had his headgear on wrong.?The coach took it off his head and threw it across the room against the wall.?It tells you much more about Keegan’s integrity than the coaches when Keegan went back to practice.?Hopefully, it tells you about my integrity in that I didn’t do my best to throw the “coach” across the room.?We joined another club.
?Locally, Josh Briggs, Colorado City Recreation Director, tells me that they have 93 young people playing basketball right now.?About 120 play baseball and softball, and soccer usually runs around 100.?Of course, some children do several sports.
?Nationally, statistics tell us that 75% of American families with school-aged children have at least one child participating in organized sports.?That comes out to 45-50 million children.
?Another statistic said that 58 percent of youth, ages 6 to 17 years, participated in team sports or took sports lessons after school or on weekends in the previous 12 months.
?The Colorado City recreation department has trouble finding enough coaches, also. ?Do you have what it takes to be a coach??From my perspective (I have coached everything from youth sports to college level), who you are is more important than what you know.?
?If, like Vince Lombardi, Hall of Fame Coach of the Green Bay Packers, you believe that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” maybe youth sports aren’t for you.?When we coach children, we should be focused on the lesson’s sports can teach us for life.?Hard work, persistence, teamwork, the value of physical exertion, and sportsmanship, to mention a few.?
?At each level, winning becomes a little more important, but the younger the team the more we (as coaches) are dealing with all different levels of physical development.?Stress only winning and the late bloomers end up in the stands when they get older.
?Even the very skilled children are just children.?I sat in front of two seventh graders at a high school wrestling tournament.?They had both been very successful, but one of them wasn’t going to wrestle anymore.?He was tired of cutting weight.?Cutting weight in the 6th grade??Cutting weight when his body is headed toward puberty??A coach, and possibly a parent, needed to be doing something else besides coaching wrestling.
?Let me be clear, I am not suggesting that every child is a winner, or that every child gets a trophy.?I’m not suggesting we don’t keep score.?That’s as damaging to children as the win at all cost mentality.?
???Winning is more fun than losing, but less important than developing the skills in every player, not just the gifted.?Losing teaches perseverance, encourages working harder, and, let’s face it, losing in life may be a little more commonplace than winning.?If you never lose as a child, you don’t know how to pick up and get back into the game later in life.
??Just as an athlete needs to learn to lose to better appreciate a victory, a person needs to risk failure in order to build character. Character is built when a person moves out of their comfort zone and faces the possibility of failure. Learn to push yourself toward success, handle coming up short, and become a better person regardless of the outcome.?That’s what youth sports, and sports in general, should be teaching.?
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