Winning & Losing in Youth Sports
April 24th, 2007 by COD
Shannon has stirred the pot with her post extolling the virtues of going for the win in youth sports.
Winning is more fun than losing. Even the most hardened anti-competitive socialist will probably agree to that. However, in youth team sports, no single kid really has much control over the final outcome of the game. (Dominant pitchers being an exception.) If the coach focuses on the outcome, he sucks the joy of playing right out of the game. If winning really matters, how much fun can the left fielder have in a loss if he never even sees the ball on defense and gets 2 at bats during the game? The coach should focus on teaching the fundamentals of the game. Winning baseball, basketball, or even in business is done by executing the little things properly. The victories to be celebrated in youth sports are not the final outcomes, but the gradual day-to-day improvement that leads to those victories. Little Johnny can’t control the final score, but he can control what he does when at bat or on the field. If the kids get better as both individual players and as a team after every game and practice, they’ll usually win more than they lose anyway.
I’ve seen Little League teams with two dominant pitchers that threw complete game shutouts every game. The rest of the kids were miserable because they knew they didn’t really matter. The coach didn’t care if they got better as players, because his two pitchers virtually guaranteed the league championship. Have fun and get better each practice and game are the only goals a youth sports coach should care about.
Of course, even if you do everything perfectly, you still don’t always win. That is a lesson that kids should get from sports.
It’s been my experience in over a dozen seasons of youth baseball and basketball that the parents care far more about the final score than the kids. Even when I’ve had kids crying after a close loss, two minutes later they were over it and were far more concerned with the contents of the snack cooler.
My previous rantings on youth sports.
http://www.odonnellweb.com/?p=1081
http://www.odonnellweb.com/?p=637
http://www.odonnellweb.com/?p=1232
31 Responses to “Winning & Losing in Youth Sports”
Wow, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at some of the comments over there, but I am. Any kid whose parent pays for them to play should get to play – and not just standing in the outfield because the ball won’t come to him or her. It is, or should be, about developing the players, not winning. I think even without tryouts the not-so-good players weed themselves out as they get older. I wasn’t bad at softball, but I wasn’t good at it either. I always ended up being one of the best on a really sucky team, but I knew that I would be one of the worst on a “good” team, and I didn’t care for either, so I stopped playing in junior high. I think that’s an age where kids start to gravitate toward things that they are better at anyway.
“Extolling the virtues of the win”… Wow, I sound like such a bitch!
I agree with most of your post here, COD. What I’m trying to get to the heart of is that in order to “have fun and get better each practice” don’t kids have to do their best and hope to win? I don’t like it when coaches, teachers, etc tell kids “it doesn’t matter who wins.” To me, that’s akin to saying, “Aw, shucks just go on out into the world and muddle along and there’ll be a place for you.”
Don’t teach your kids that winning is everything. But what’s wrong with teaching them that *trying to win* is everything?
I teach them to do their best and try hard, because in the end as individuals they have little control over the score. I want their sense of worth from the game to be predicated on what they put it into it, not what the scorebook says at the end.
I think we more or less agree – it’s just that you see the score as an indicator of the effort, and I’m not convinced that in youth sports that there is much of a relationship between the two.
I’ve seen this from both sides and think “balance” is key. Last year my soccer-loving son played on a team where the coach said “winning doesn’t matter and we’re not going to try to win. This is rec soccer.” hhhmm. Well, I don’t think that’s a basis for teaching sportsmanship or teaching skills – neither of which the coach paid much attention to. Basically, the coach stood around and talked to parents, who became increasingly frustrated with nothing happening on the field.
So this year I’m the coach. I’ve told the kids, we’re going to try to win, because the only way to really learn about losing gracefully is to care about the win. And, we’re going to learn skills, because that helps us come closer to winning and because it’s joyful to try to get better at things. And we’re going to have fun and keep things in perspective. We’re the smallest, youngest team, so I doubt our W-L record will be great. But we are going to learn to pass, we are going to attempt to win, and we are going to try for perspective and sportsmanship.
And I am going to do my level best to make sure every kid gets fun playing time and lots of “touches” in practice. That is one of the cool things about a well-run soccer practice, is that no kid has to fall asleep out there. With the right forethought, a coach can make it so every kid touches the ball hundreds of times in an hour. With no forethought, it’s no better than the poor left fielder in a pitching-dominated game.
Our team motto is “Play Hard. Pass. Have Fun!”
I hate standing around in practice. I usually break the kids into small groups and put them in different corners of the field with assistant coaches to work on baseball drills. It’s tough in baseball because at any given moment in a baseball game, most of the players aren’t engaged with the ball. It takes some creativity to run a 2 hour practice with minimal standing around time.
We left team sports years ago because there weren’t enough coaches like you. We have found other ways to develop teamwork, as you know, and my kids still enjoy a game of baseball played loosely with friends. It’s a shame that organized sports have largely lost that sense of fun.
(Clintonian drawl) — “It all depends on what meaning of the word ‘win’ wins . . .”
If the final score is not what defines winning for everyone playing, then there’s no way to have a meaningful conversation about winning (much less losing.)
Just like school and riches, or even love and war.
I’ve coached my son several seasons of youth soccer. My goal in coaching is not to win, but I will admit that I want my team to win, and I know that the kids want to win.
At this level, my goal will never be to win but to follow a lot of what Chris has said about developing skills. I also love what Jeanne said about the kids getting hundreds of touches.
If the kids I coach end the season as better players, and if I’ve helped increase their love of the game, then I have done my job, and I consider that a win. If I’ve done my job, then we’ve won some games and lost some games. Losing isn’t bad as it gives the coaches and the team a picture of strengths and weaknesses and where more work needs to be done.
My own motto as a coach is simply to do my best, and that’s all I require of my teams, that they do their best. I tell them that several times at every practice and at every game. If they are giving their very best effort at all times then they will learn, they will develop skills, and they will go farther in the end.
The drive to win can too easily turn to win at all costs. I absolutely detest cheating and unfairness and most especially at such a young age. What does it teach our kids if they have reason to believe that any amount of their worth rests in any way on whether they won?
A prime example would be this weekend’s derby match that my wife played in. We lost to the other team, but our skaters played fair and followed the rules. We even actually scored more points than them, but we were in their house and were basically able to choose A) do our best and be proud of our effort or B) stoop to their level and beat them at their own game. I’m proud of our team for doing the right thing regardless of the outcome. I would not respect them one bit if we’d won in a dirty tit for tat fight.
What a thoughtful post and thoughtful comments! My kids are too young for sports yet but this is definitely on my mind going forward. If they play the same sports as I do, they’ll play combative sports, which pretty much guarantees game time since most of the play is one-on-one. And, traditionally in a lot of the martial arts, there’s a good perspective on winning and losing and doing your best (in fact, sometimes you’re just happy to survive your nervousness and fear). But we’ll see how this goes. Lot of food for thought, thank you.
I’ll be Manny playing a hit off the Green Monster, with this “off the wall” thought — cognitive psychology teaches that humans are weighted toward avoiding risk rather than seeking potential gain. Losing feels relatively worse to us than winning feels good, in other words. So on a mythical “level playing field” the normal person’s inclination is tilted toward preventing loss rather than going for the win.
Assuming both wins and losses will occur in any sport, it seems like this would make competition a losing proposition for anyone with normal psychology, and few kids or parents would want to participate?
So the fact that we still play anyway, that sports are so popular and persistent in our culture, means there MUST be much more to it than the one dynamic of “winning and losing” as determined by scores and stats. There must be a whole complex hidden curriculum to sports (like JT Gatto describes in high school) that we can’t even perceive, much less control as lesson units for our kids.
I suspect the potential payoff (“win”) that outweighs the risks and attracts so many families to organized competition — in sports or the classroom — is all about relationships, with fun peers and coaches like COD.
(TCRecord has a new article free this week about learning through trusted relationships.)
So I agree with Chas, that it is endlessly interesting to think about!
Still playing the lessons of sports off the wall — war is the ultimate win-loss competition. “Band of Brothers” (like Peyton Manning?) teaches that warriors fight not for any abstract principle or even for themselves but for their trusted teammates on either side. . .
JJ, are you suggesting an us vs. them mentality? That’s interesting to think of from that perspective. It also approaches thoughts I’ve had about professional sports lately.
I seem to remember when I was much younger having more than the team you cheered for. You could expect players to be with a team for many years so that I could say, to some extent, I grew up with Dale Murphy and Dominique Wilkins. It seems now though, that while a team may have a main person or two that are associated with the organization, it’s become less about building a team of people that the fans can get to know and love and more about hiring and firing in a corporate sense, a drive to win regardless of much else.
Loyalty to a team seems a little empty to me when considering that you can not really be loyal to the players who may be gone soon.
I nearly forgot an interesting conversation I had last night. We were at my oldest son’s soccer practice and was talking with the two coaches.
The head coach was discussing coaches he’d known in the past, one in particular, who somehow managed to continue coaching regardless of what he did. He was the coach caught several times, while coaching peewee flag football, tying the flags on his team. He was the coach in youth baseball using a rubber ball when his team was at bat.
This is why I personally so detest the all out drive to win. It makes it easier, and to some possibly even reasonable, when this sort of thing happens. My first thought, what are those kids learning when their coach is so eager to break rules to allow his team the win?
Fans are an angle I hadn’t thought of, sam — I was going from the comraderie that real players and real warriors themselves say they learn from the competitive experience, how in the end what counts is your brethren there alongside you who you would get hurt for, the guys who have your back and equally would get hurt for you, and learning to trust and love the leader who is right there with you (the hands-on coach but not the team owner or figurehead of a nation).
But what about the fans and spectators, hmmm . . . that would apply more to us parents, I guess? I wish we DID know how to improve those lessons!
One of the things I like about recreational soccer is every child gets to play at least 50% of the game.
That said, District tournaments were last weekend. The George Green parents are a pain in the butt. They are rude, obnoxious, and insult the opposing team and tell their players to hurt opposing players. They were so BAD their OWN kids were asking them to be quit. And a REF carded one parent and kicked him off the sidelines.
C’mon folks! Surely you must realize that there is a BIG difference between teaching your child the value of doing his best and teaching them to cheat or hurt others so they can win at all costs!
Games have a winner and a loser. Conveying to your child that they should do their personal best to win does not mean you are telling them they are worthless if they lose. It means that you are teaching them a valuable lesson about life: You work hard, you succeed. Why has success suddenly become a curse word????
And trying your best for your team, for your friends, so that you can share in a bonding experience (win OR lose) also has great value.
Frankly, I’m shocked to read so many parents saying that they don’t want their kids to want to win. Has mediocrity and entitlement become the goal in parenting now? I think it’s a very sad statement about our future.
Wanting to win and needing to win in order to enjoy the game are two different issues. I want a Ferrari, but I don’t need one and it’s not ruining my day because I don’t have one and likely never will. There are parents in the response to your original post whose day is clearly ruined if junior’s little league team loses the game. The job of a little league coach is to develop players while trying to win. If those goals conflict, developing players is what you focus on.
Any kid that shows up to practice, follows the rules, and puts in the effort deserves playing time. If he happens to be a lousy hitter and is up with the game on the line, so be it. The weak player doing his best has exactly the same right to take that shot at being the hero as the talented kid. On the flip side, if the opposing team’s best hitter is up with the game on the line and first base open we are pitching to him. The pitcher will learn far more from that confrontation (regardless of how it turns out) than he will by issuing an intentional walk.
See http://www.odonnellweb.com/?p=2665
The feel I’m getting from many comments (on both our posts) is, “Going for the win can easily lead to cheating, to cut-throat activities, or to having kids feel bad about themselves, so let’s just avoid all that and tell the kids winning doesn’t matter.” I object to that. If someone cheats, it’s the parents’ and coach’s responsibility to nip that in the bud. If a kid feels bad about something that happened in a game, they can learn a lesson from that.
I’ve never disagreed that everyone on a team deserves equal playing time. But I think at a certain level, not *everyone* should be allowed on the team in the first place. But that’s not the real issue for me. My issue is that teaching kids to want to succeed and earn their place is NOT a bad thing.
As I said earlier, in youth sports the coaches job is to develop players while trying to win. However, winning is the secondary goal. It’s more important that the kids learn to play the game properly.
However, your post was about coach pitch, where in my opinion the really shouldn’t even be keeping an official score. There are way too many variables outside the realm of normal baseball for the score to have any real meaning. 8-9 year olds are thrilled when they get a hit or their friend score a run. That’s the stuff to focus on at that age, not the final score. An 8 year old has so little personal impact on the final score that making the final score the ‘why’ behind being there in the first place is demotivating and quite frankly, stupid.
Sorry if my post wasn’t clear – it’s not coach-pitch. He’s playing A-ball in which kids pitch, but for the first half of the season, they don’t let the kids pitch after throwing 4 balls. Anyway, it feels like this is just going in circles and we essentially agree, so I’ll leave it at that.
Don’t even get me started on this topic. My disinterest and general disdain for sports as an adult is directly related to the way I was treated by coaches and parents when I was young.
Let’s just say I wasn’t the best player on the team. I wasn’t ever given a chance to enjoy participating and improve since I was deemed to be a poor player early on and was left on the bench. When my kids were participating in sports, I saw most of those same attitudes and behaviors. Simply put, people are obsessed with winning, and all but the best players typically suffer in the process. Yeah, that’s a healthy activity. 
I’m glad my kids lost interest in sports by the time they got to high school.
Rex has a point that there IS research to back up — I won’t bore everyone and don’t have time to retrieve it right now anyway, but essentially it’s the old nature-nurture thing: nature differences are very small when kids are little, but then parents and coaches (and teammates) favor the seemingly better kids, or those who grow a little faster, whatever, with scads more opportunities and special training, summer sports camps and awards, and surprise! All those incremental opportunity differences add up over time, the gap gets wider and wider because all the other kids gradually stop playing at all, what’s the use — and then by high school, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and there are huge gaps. A few kids seem like superstars. But it really could have been almost any kid given that much emphasis and reinforcement. It was almost all based on nurture, given in buckloads to the kids with only very slight nature advantage . . .
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The kid on my team who had never played before, and whose soccer skills are dismal, is having a blast out there. Her mom says she’s out kicking the ball against the side of the garage every afternoon instead of “more TV.” She is clearly in the groove to move because she’s gotten an opportunity to play youth sports. (Not that her parents couldn’t take her hiking or biking — but, y’know, they haven’t and probably aren’t going to).
A mom expressed surprise at practice that our Coaching Staff (Read: me, my husband, 18 yo brother and 16 yo brother – oh my, the poor people get a whole homeschooling family) is actually teaching soccer — and the kids with the good skills are getting to learn and think about game strategy, a real brain builder that will also provide a physical challenge for them.
It’s all about Attitude. I told “my” parents Wed. night that just as our team is going to be the “team that passes,” our parents are going to be known as the “supportive parents.” Sure, I’m going to find out who the rogues are on Saturday morning, but our family will continue to do our best to marginalize that attitude and demonstrate sportsmanship, give every kid a chance to play, and be as competitive
I also had a cool scrimmage Wed. night against a bigger, more advanced team. I told their coach right off what I was looking for, and it was terrific how he responded. He gave his clearly superior team the challenge of never shooting without passing at least three times. This gave them a strategic challenge and opportunity to work on their passing and evened the odds against my little guys, who had more opportunities to take the ball and didn’t get scored on so bad. I also requested to use my whistle to play “freeze tag.” When I blew, everyone stopped dead in their tracks, so we could show the kids when they were out of position, too close to pass, offsides, etc. The other team needed none of this, but those kids on the opposing team were right in there with us, helping to explain to the younger kids where they needed to be. Smiles all around.
Shhhhh. Don’t tell anyone. We’re homeschooling soccer. : )
Woops – someone I musta lost a piece of one sentence, which should have read “be as competitive as possible in that context.”
Sorry. Like I’m not long-winded enough and have to post again.
SomeHOW not SomeONE. I give up.
That’s exactly how I handled basketball. I did the freeze tag thing a lot. We scrimmaged with the 4 pass rule ala Hoosiers. We scrimmaged where layups were worth 3 points, shots in the paint worth 2, and outside jumpers worth one. We focused on teaching the kids what to do, even though in a lot of cases they weren’t quite up to the task physically. Attempting the proper pass resulted in a round of attaboys, regardless of the result. We played man-man to defense 100% of the time, and were the only team in the county doing it. Did it cost us a game or two? Most certainly it did, although we never had a losing season in Breck’s 4 year basketball career. And we had 8 or 9 kids request to be back on my team each year. That to me was the ultimate indicator of success. The kids were having so much fun not winning the league championship that they wanted to do it again.
Jeanne and COD – love this freeze tag time-out for noticing what’s happening and helping kids figure it out for themselves, thank you! We do this mentally all the time in our unschooling but I never thought to consider it a form of good coaching, or that it worked in physical coaching the same way. We do it in the car a LOT, discussing the day’s events, listening to talk radio or reading marquee and political signs, in traffic jams, school bus stops in a silly place, etc. Suddenly we all pounce on something that looks or sounds a little off and figure out why, unraveling the broken logic plays.
Remember in the movie War Games, the NORAD supercomputer learns “the only way to win is not to play the game?”
Maybe for kids’ sports, the opposite is true? — the only way to LOSE is not to play the game.
I wouldn’t go that far JJ. Breck had a baseball coach once that was so bad that it set Breck two years on his baseball confidence and almost ruined the game for him. There is nothing so pure that an asshole adult can’t ruin it for kids. Breck would have been much better off not playing that season.
Yeah, point taken. Play “the game” (baseball or soccer, say) somehow if you love it and want to, without being dissuaded — but that sure doesn’t mean every game and team and sports situation.
[...] There’s some dissenting discussion at Chris O’Donnell’s site: Winning baseball, basketball, or even in business is done by executing the little things properly. The victories to be celebrated in youth sports are not the final outcomes, but the gradual day-to-day improvement that leads to those victories. Little Johnny can’t control the final score, but he can control what he does when at bat or on the field. [...]