Teaching how to win and lose gracefully

Recently, I came across the following quote on Facebook: “I would rather watch them lose with good attitude than win with a bad one” written by Christine Derengowski.  This is a quote that I can totally agree with and one that should be posted at every youth sports field. As I have been saying for years now, youth sports should be a training ground to teach our children the love of a game, how to be a good teammate, leadership skills, get some exercise, be outside with friends and yes, how to win and lose gracefully.  Youth sports should not be turning our children, as young as 4 years old, into little “professionals” who are playing a single sport year-round with all sorts of “specialized” training and traveling all over the country to play in tournaments.

            Now, I know that people are reading this and saying, “this guy is clueless because in the words of Herm Edwards, “you play to win the game.”  While, I do not disagree with what Herm said, if you are playing a game, then you should be trying to win; however, when Mr. Edwards said this quote, he was coaching The New York Jets, a professional football team and not some peewee team in Podunk America and to me, there is a huge difference and what everyone misses when using this quote.  In fact, the full quote is “You play to win the game.  You don’t play it to just play it.  That’s the great thing about sports: you play to win, and I don’t care if you don’t have any wins.  You go play to win.”  Again, this quote was made to a reporter at a press conference about his team, a professional football team.  The amazing thing is no one, including me, remembers the rest of the quote including the part about not caring “if you don’t have any wins.”

            In reading the comments on this post you could pretty much tell who the intense “win at all cost” parents were as they were the ones who were saying “show me someone who wants to lose and I’ll show you a loser.”  These comments were being made about young children playing youth sports.  Now, nowhere in Mrs. Derengowski’s quote does she say that she wants kids to lose, all she is saying is that kids have to learn to lose gracefully and she would rather see that than have a bunch of kids who win and have a bad attitude, and I cannot agree with her more.  Now, before people think that I am encouraging losing I am not, what I am trying to encourage is having coaches who are not with win at all costs coaches, but coaches who can teach children to win or lose with the same grace.

            When I was coaching both youth soccer and baseball it was always my goal for my teams to win.  Let’s be honest, it is much more fun to win than lose. However, in every game there is a winner and a loser and if we make the kids who lose feel like losers what are we doing to their self-confidence?  When I started coaching baseball with my friends our team was not very good, but we worked hard, practiced and the boys got better. In fact, I cannot remember a practice where we did not have full attendance, a rarity for a team not winning games, even in the youth sports world, and we had parents who were appreciative of what we were doing with the boys.  We taught the boys the game in a way that they could understand and we moved them around to different positions to give them a chance to learn those positions. When our players moved up from the Rookie League to the Major League the coaches who were getting our players knew that they were getting players who knew the game and could function in game situations. Additionally, we taught them to respect the game and how to win and lose with grace.  One of the reasons that I loved coaching with these people was the philosophy that the manager had which was we were going to try to win, but it was not going to be at all costs.

Personally, I have always said that I would rather have a team of average players who want to work hard and get better than a team of “superstars” who have attitude problems and that is how I coached my soccer teams for years.  My coaching philosophy was to work with all the players on the team no matter what what their skill level and abilities.  This philosophy was not popular with the parents of the “superstars” on the team as they wanted me to focus on the “better” players because they wanted to win while my goal was to improve the skill level of everyone on the team and since I was coaching, my philosophy won out.

I realize when I write about these issues my thoughts come across as “black and white” and I also realize that there are many shades of grey in these issues. The one aspect I will not back down from is the fact that we have to reevaluate the way that are coaching our young children.