In Praise of Losing the Game...

I went to a small, private Catholic school until the seventh grade, though we were unaffiliated with the diocesan religious education office due to the fact that we were unaffiliated with any particular parish. The diocese I was living in at the time had a rule that Catholic schools had to have a chaplain of some sort, and the school, to be honest, could not really afford one. Students attending were in grades 1-12, and in its second year, the students had the opportunity to participate in sports in a parochial league of other non-Catholic Christian schools.

With only 100 students in the whole school and nearly everyone wanting to play sports, the varsity teams were made up of students as low as 4th grade (I was in the sixth). Needless to say, when the soccer team won our very first game 2-1 (the last game of the second season), we were ecstatic. We lost every other game. No loss was more memorable, though, than the game against Sunrise Christian Academy. 13-0. In a soccer game, that is quite the killing. Worse yet? It was the Jr. Varsity Team. We lost. Badly. And we lost to the better team. Some may have wondered why we even played them in the first place ... but that was really as far as the wonder took us. We never once thought they should have lightened up on us for the game (we had lost to a Jr. High School Team 7-2 the week before, and we didn't ask them to lighten up either). We were used to the humiliation; believe you me.

I am pretty shocked and appalled, then, that a small parochial league and one of the schools in said league has reacted pretty extremely to a 100-0 win. The coach said he was not sorry for the way his girls played. I don't think he should be sorry, yet that attitude got him FIRED. Fired?! What did they want him to do? "Girls, stop playing. In fact, walk off the court and let them try to catch up to us."

Of course he should not do that. That would patronize and humiliate the losing team to an even greater degree. He would be a pretty bad coach if he told his girls to play one way with one team and a different way with another. Whatever happened to giving 100% all the time? It appears that both teams did so. There's no need for the school to be embarrassed or to call it un-Christ-like.

This is what has happened to the sports culture. We teach our kids that winning the game does not matter, and we hand out trophies to every player on the team, no matter whether or not they won or lost. Hard work? Dedication? A thing of the past. We just cannot accept that some teams are just MUCH, MUCH better than other teams. In the process, the children learn nothing about competition, and the real world lessons that sports are supposed to teach us are lost. No wonder we're called the lazy generation. Forget running so as to win; just run, and we'll make you feel as though you won, even though you're talent has been buried and yielded no fruit.

AN AMEN FROM DAVE -- It's not just sports culture. It's all culture. And it's difficult to believe that it's all just one big coincidence that winners are being punished for winning and losers are being "bailed out" or, er, rescued. We're teaching all of our children, of every age, that it's not okay to fail. Yet failure is one of the crucial learning moments in every worthwhile life.