Growing up, I don’t remember it always being about winning. If you weren’t good enough, you didn’t make the team. It really was that simple. You LOST.
🏀 It was a pretty tough pill to swallow as a kid, especially when teams were announced with all the kids sitting in the middle of the Court. No emails nor Facebook posts. Just a coach & their list.
😳 Somehow, things have changed. I seem to be surrounded mostly by people who only talk to kids about winning. On a couple of recent occasions, I’ve seen what I’d call a “win at ALL costs” parenting scenario. It sucks.
🏉 Last week, our U12s Rugby team needed to win the final Round game to make the Semis. The boys were so pumped.
📉 On arriving at the game, Coach Matt pulls me aside & says “You’re not going to believe this Sim; there’s been a stuff up with some win-loss points allocation throughout the regular season. No matter what happens today, we can’t make the Semis”.
My immediate reaction: “Don’t tell the boys until the after the game. They’ll be devastated if they don’t think they can win the Comp”.
This was the tact the coaches had already decided to take.
❌ For the whole first half I felt physically ill; thinking about what we’d done. Why didn’t we tell them?
Was it because we didn’t want them to think they’d lost before they’d started? There was such a focus on winning but this would have been the perfect opportunity to teach them how to lose.
❤️ At half time, the boys were down by one try (5 pts). In their huddle, they’re all nattering on about “Winning to make the Semis”. I walk over to the coach: “I think we should tell them; but maybe we can use this moment to teach them an important lesson about ‘winning & losing’…?”
👬 Coach asked them to put their arms around each other & feel the jersey of who was standing beside them. Their mate. Their team mate.
✅ He explained the “points thing” to them. They’d missed out. LOST.
He told them that they should absolutely still want to win this game, but that “winning” is about a lot more than making the Semis.
❤️ He told them that they should want to win for their Club they represent, for their team mates (new crew this year), for the parents who dropped them to training & games 3x / week, for their sponsors & supporters.
💙 He told them they were playing on their home ground for what we now knew was their final game of the season; that a bunch of supporters had come to watch them play.
❤️ And then he says: “Boys, we can’t win the Comp but, the way you’ve played this season – and represented yourselves – you’ve already won. No matter what happens out there today, you make sure you walk off the field with your heads held high”.
❗️The boys lifted in the second half. They won the game by 17 points.
🙌 You’d think they’d won the World Cup!
👏 They learnt to lose by thinking about “winning” a little differently.
❤️ Something in this for all of us perhaps.
