Youth Sports

Families,

As many of you know, I coach soccer for the Michigan Jaguars soccer club and this past weekend I had a great conversation with a parent about his son and the year. For context, this parent has been with the club for several years and he is a principal of a middle school in another district. I asked him how the year was going, you know the typical banter when you haven’t seen someone in a while, and he said the year was going better than he could have hoped for. I followed up with, is he scoring lots of goals, the team winning a lot of games? There was a pause, and what he said next was truly one of the first times I have been caught off guard as a coach in the past 10 years.

He said no, the team has actually been struggling here a bit and my son is no longer playing forward. They moved him into the midfield which he was not used to. I was confused here a bit because normally when a parent says the year is going great, in terms of sports, they are talking about wins and losses but in this case, the father was over the moon excited that the team and his son was struggling. He continued to say, “Listen when we signed up for soccer years ago I wanted three things for my son. One to learn and get better at a sport, two to learn how to be a part of the team and everything that goes along with that, and three to learn how to deal with stuff he doesn’t really want to deal with.  He said, “It doesn’t matter how many W’s the team gets if the kids don’t learn the teamwork and how to deal with the adversity part of the game at this age.”

That comment stuck with me this entire week. I remember when I was the youth director for the club I used to tell coaches that teams can win too much.  Winning is fun, it shows great progress, but winning all the time at young ages doesn’t develop the mental aspects of the game that kids will have to learn in order to go the distance.  When you lose, it naturally builds humility, self-reflection, and self-realization. I used to have my coaches teach kids how to deal with a loss or failure in a proactive way and to view failure as an opportunity to grow and get better. In soccer, as in school or life, we will all fail at something, we will struggle, and we will have to overcome. The number of stories you can tell about teams, students, athletes, and people failing before they succeeded are far too many to be a coincidence.  Maybe a small lesson here is that you have to fail before you can succeed and that perhaps you can fail your way into success if you are able to learn from mistakes.

I always try to translate the field back into the school environment so when I reflect on that I always come back to maybe getting the A isn’t the end game. Maybe the endgame is what we’ve learned on our journey. Maybe if students haven’t lost or struggled in school we’ve missed a major part of elementary school, and perhaps getting a C could be the best learning opportunity for a child throughout the year. Or if I take the same soccer comment and change the W’s to A’s it would read, “It doesn’t matter how many A’s the student gets if he/she doesn’t learn the collaboration and how to deal with the adversity part of school at this age.”

                Regardless of stance, I am glad this family is getting what they want out of youth sports at a young age. I know the lessons he learns this year will translate into his future and he will be a better student, player, son, and friend for learning those lessons as a 10-year-old.

All the best,