Confessions of a Travel Softball Coach
Many of you will read the title of this post and likely realize that it is a Paul "Bear" Bryant quote with just one word substituted. There are no two words in the English language with polar opposite meanings than the two words that have been substituted. America loves a winner and hates a loser.
Here is the entire quote, if you don't know it:
“I’d like for people to remember me as a winner, because I ain’t never been nothin but a winner.”
A lot of you are racking your brains on how a staunch Auburn fan would dare quote the antithesis of Auburn football, much less to take that quote about being a winner and turn the quote on himself and call himself "nothin' but a loser".
We will get there and when we do, I hope you will see that there is no greater force than a motivated perennial loser and that being motivated by losing is the single greatest teaching force in sports. If you want your kid to reach their full potential, to harness every ounce of grit, determination, talent, and work ethic, they will have to lose and the more they lose, the better it will be for them to reach the pinnacle. Furthermore, losing in sports can promote tremendous personal growth and strength off the field. That kind of thinking isn't going to be popular with many people.
After one of the many brutal losses I took in my first year as a softball coach, I was approached by a parent and asked a very pointed question.
"How can you be ok after losing like this?"
That would seem to be a fairly nebulous question with many meanings and possible answers.
Oh, I knew exactly what this parent meant and perhaps they expected a litany of excuses or reasons. The good Lord knows that I know them all. Instead I crossed my arms as I sat on the bench in that tiny little dugout of that tiny little teeball field and shrugged as I thought about my answer. I took off my pink Killa Kupcakes hat and sighed.
"All I've ever done is lose. I've been a loser all my life. This isn't a new experience for me."
That's probably not EXACTLY how the quote went, but it's close and it isn't the only conversation I had with this parent along these lines. When it comes to ball parents, there are only a few stereotypes and this one was firmly in the "win at all costs" category and the reality of losing game after game, sometimes by a wide margin was unacceptable, for whatever reason. From this parent's perspective, I wasn't doing my job to win games and that me accepting losses in such a calm manner must mean that I was apathetic about coaching and therefore a bad coach and a loser.
The truth is, there was a lot more going on with coaching this team than just the W-L column and I was in it for the future. I wasn't willing to take a little immediate success to sacrifice the future. I'd lost a lot of games, what's a few more?
The truth is, there was a lot more going on with coaching this team than just the W-L column and I was in it for the future. I wasn't willing to take a little immediate success to sacrifice the future. I'd lost a lot of games, what's a few more?
At least part of what that parent thought was right. I am a loser. I always have been and I embrace that as the perhaps the single greatest strength in my personality.
Losing in sports started at an early age. In my case, before birth. God gave me a great mind for sports, a desire to succeed in them, and ALMOST all the physical gifts to be a great ball player. I say ALMOST because genetics remains undefeated and I would never have the size or height to do anything to the level I wanted to do.
As I've written, I played a lot of other sports. I loved basketball, but can't ever recall winning any games. I know we had winless seasons. I played peewee football for just one year and we literally scored two touchdowns the entire winless year. I poured my heart and soul into highschool football and despite playing for the largest school north of Birmingham, our win totals over four years: 6-4, 4-6, 1-9, and 4-6. The best year of soccer I ever had was a .500 team my junior year. We followed that up with a single win my senior year.
I could tell story upon story of being a loser. Even today, I still play adult league softball, flag football, and soccer. I'll let you guess how those seasons typically go. I've joked with people that I have lost more sports competitions than probably anyone on the planet. But I think the following story shows the power of being a loser and being motivated by that, in the right way.
Like most kids, baseball was my first sport. Each and every year, we had a baseball draft and each and every year my dad ended up with the same players, but not because they were good players, but because they were the players no one wanted. Every year, there was a really good team from our park and a really bad one. You can guess which team I played on. In the first three years of playing for this team, I don't know if we won a single game. Not only could we not beat the team from our own park, we surely couldn't compete with teams from the more "well-off" areas with much larger populations. There was a lot of frustration to go around, for sure.
On the fourth year, things changed. I'd love to tell you that we had some sort of great sports moment. It wasn't like that. I believe my dad and the other families came to grips with being handed select players, handicapped on field time, and losing. I believe they accepted this as motivation and not an excuse. That season, we won the only championship I ever won. It was an incredible experience that made a life-long impact on a 3rd grader. It was accomplished by a lot of hard work, working through adversity off the field, but perhaps more important, treating every player equally in attempt to develop them all and refused to give up on a player. Each player was given opportunities that other teams would never give them for fear of losing a game.
Having the power to accept losing by extracting the potential of every player was huge. I've seen it elsewhere and most of the great teams and coaches exhibit this. There's the old cliche about a team being only as good as the worst player, but not every coach lives by that.
Having the power to accept losing by extracting the potential of every player was huge. I've seen it elsewhere and most of the great teams and coaches exhibit this. There's the old cliche about a team being only as good as the worst player, but not every coach lives by that.
When Aubree began playing softball, I was re-acquainted with this process and I found myself in the same situation that my dad had found himself in years before. I made many phone calls with my dad, who explained that this is what he had dealt with in my youth. I could despair and be overcome by the situation, or I could use my life's lessons on losing to help me in my time of need.
So, when the question of "How can you be ok after losing like this?" was leveled upon me, I was well prepared for it. Another loss for me wasn't anything new and it wasn't going to change me. I'd still wake up tomorrow, just as I had done every day after losing. Hopefully, I would wake up with a little more knowledge and just as much determination. Or, I could be the coach society expects. I could yell and scream at players and argue with the umpires. I could quit playing these six year old girls in different positions when there was CLEARLY a better player to play there. I could send the "bad" players into right field and let them kick dirt.
Games aren't decided by a play. Seasons aren't decided by a game. Sports careers aren't decided by a season. Life isn't decided by a sports career. I am living proof of that. All I've known in sports is losing, but it's made me a motivated coach because I've seen what harnessing that motivation can do and I've been a part of it. So, I accepted the losses as fair trade for giving each and every girl a chance to get better and certainly to keep them from quitting. I looked to the future, hoping they would have a moment like me.
That team never won anything of relevance, but as I look at the picture on my desk of the 2013 Killa Kupcakes, I am proud to say that at least SEVEN of the ELEVEN players on that team are still playing travel softball, to this day, and they all approach me when I see them at tournaments. That's a far cry from today's expectation of player turnover, which I believe is almost completely driven by coaching to win at all costs.
Obviously, this entire post is about losing and dealing with adversity. In a society obsessed at winning, and sometimes winning at all cost, the term "dealing with adversity" is thrown around a lot, but not in the context of losing. Losing is simply something that is deemed unacceptable. You can see that if attend your local teeball game. If you don't accept losing, you can't accept the motivation and knowledge it brings. I think this is why sports are on such a decline and society has so many problems.
The jury is out on just what kind of coach I am for several reasons. First, I am just getting started at being a serious travel ball coach and it will take some time to see if I can develop ball players.
Second, and most importantly, while preparing them on the field is my main goal, my ULTIMATE goal is to produce well-rounded, humble, and hard-working players who will translate what they learn from me off the field as young adults. Since the oldest player I have coached is just 14, we still have several years to see what kind of young ladies they will become. For all I know, this could be my last year to coach but if it is, I hope I made a positive impact on them, even if the results on the field were negative.
All of these girls will play their last game sooner rather than later, but life will just begin for them. I would be remiss if I only coached them on how to field grounders or hit dingers when they will spend far more of their life in the workplace and/or parenting young ball players of their own. Life is going to throw them nasty curves, so to speak. For the vast majority of us, life is going to knock us flat time and time again. Can they get back up? If they know how to respond to losing, they will.
I sure have. I Ain't Never Been Nothin' But a Loser
No comments:
Post a Comment