Losing hurts…
My husband is a coach. Has been his whole life. It’s just part of who he is, in large part because of the team sports he participated in as a kid. We’ve all seen and experienced bad coaching. Hopefully we’ve all had the chance to experience good coaching. My husband is a great coach. That’s a hill I’m willing to die on. Sure I’m biased, but that doesn’t change this fact.
I’m sure over the course of this blog, I’ll give you plenty of reasons to believe he’s a great coach. Let me start with this one example…
He teaches kids how to lose. Yep, he prepares them to lose. Not because he aspires to lose or wants to set the expectation that the team cannot win. You make it to the Hall of Fame in baseball if you consistently go 1 for 3 in a game. That means you lose 2 out of the 3 at bats…per game. And you still might find yourself in the Hall of Fame. If you don’t know how to handle losing gracefully and in stride, how can you love the game?
This guy has a coaching plan. It’s documented, and he hands it out to his assistant coaches on day 1 of each season. Sure there might be some tweaks here or there based on specific skills that need to be sharpened or if a team is more advanced in certain areas. But, the practice plan exists. He’s had that same mentality, and probably some iteration of that same plan, since he started coaching in his teens.
On Day 1, the kids learn how to win. And they learn how to lose. He lines them up and shows them how to win with grace. Celebrate, have fun, maybe even dogpile at home plate if they are practicing a walk off win that could send them to Williamsport. But they also learn how to lose. How to be the kid who gets tagged out for the last out of the game. The kid who strikes out. The kid who gives up the hit that scores the winning run. The kid who kicks the routine fly ball. Whatever it is. Either way, the team runs to home plate, lines up for a handshake, and looks the other team in the eye and says “good game”.
Winning is awesome. Losing sucks. But you can do both with grace. And my goodness does that lesson come in handy off the field, as much as it does on the field.
I think one of my proudest Mom moments came from this very lesson that he learned so early in my son’s playing career. Just this last season…our team won a playoff football game. We deflected a pass at the goal line as time expired to win by a score. We moved on to the next round of the playoffs, the losing team went home. We were elated, the other team was crying. Many had just played their last game ever of flag football because they aged out of the league. It was a nasty game. Lots of trash talk. It was more physical than flag football games should be. And, it was a team that we played earlier in the season that also came down to the last possession. It was evenly matched.
One of our players who was not committed to the team - only played 3 games with us, almost never came to practice - refused to shake hands after the game. Not only that, he talked trash to one player when he should have been in the handshake line. Against our request, my son went over to that other team, waited for the huddle to break, and congratulated them on a hard-fought game. He then apologized on behalf of our player for the lack of sportsmanship. I tagged along because he was walking into a hostile environment, and the kids didn’t have any time for the emotional let down before he was over there. I was a bit nervous that he would do more harm than good. But he handled it with such maturity and leadership, congratulating players for specific things they did during the game. He didn’t just throw out a generic “good game”. But rather he said things like #45 - you ran such clean routes all game. #34 - you had my number all game with tight man defense. I’m puffing my chest out right now thinking about that scene.
I know darn well that learning very early on how to lose and win with grace set the stage for him to have the wherewithal to respond in that manner in the moment. I also know that it’s a lesson he will carry with him far beyond sports. It doesn’t show up on a stat sheet. PG doesn’t acknowledge you as an “all tournament” player for this. But that’s the value of team sports in one simple-yet-powerful example and it goes so much further than any stat sheet or trophy ever could.
