Winning
I'm the manager of my 9 year old daughters soccer team. The coach just handed out to the parents a statement of his coaching philosophy. The main point, which shapes all his thoughts is that for this team the goal should be having fun and developing skills. Reading it crystalized some thoughts I've had for a while on sports and the concept of "winning". I thought I'd put them here (and maybe some other places too).
I've noticed that the concept of "winning" has lost some luster in the area of kid's sports in the last couple of decades. This is understandable in view of the spectacle of parents and coaches driving kids to lose sight of all other considerations in the pursuit of victory, to the point where winning becomes an end in itself, divorced from any other considerations or contexts. And so, today, the focus of sports for kids is non-competitive, and is all about having fun, getting exercise, and learning skills (both social and personal). In my opinion this is unfortunate for a few reasons.
The first reason is that the kids never learn what winning is (or should be) in the full context of the the game. They never learn the proper, acceptable, and hornorable methods for achieving victory, or that some ways to win will rob your victory of all meaning. In other words, they don't learn to associate winning with positive character traits. They don't learn to scorn winning by cheating or other underhanded and unethical methods. IMO, it's vital to tie the concept of winning to the concept of honor, playing by the rules, sacrificing for the team, and doing your best. This is something that must be learned and sports is the best and most natural way to teach it. Traditionally, this was taught to children on sports teams. Today, with kids never learning that, winning (or succeeding) by cheating, lying, or other such methods brings no shame or even embarrassment to them. Learning the proper method to win in sports is a straight path to learning how to succeed by the proper methods in life. This is because the virtues learned by struggling to win honorably in sports are the same virtues that are needed to succeed honorably in life. Sports are trial laboratories for life, where it matters what you do and how you act in your quest for victory. This leads me to the next issue.
The second reason why winning is important is that it provides the impetus for learning some of the most vital and important skills that we need to learn in life. We learn about ourselves and how to access and develop our inner resources, our inner strengths, that we will all need as we go through life, and can only be found by being in a situation that demands them. Until we come face to face with adversity, loss, defeat, shame, etc. , we don't know how to deal with them. Having a situation where we can learn these things as children, where the consequence is the pain of loosing a game that matters to you is better than learning as an adult or teen where the consequence can be more far reaching and harmful. We all need to practice these skills, develop these skills, and develop confidence in our ability to keep going past the pain and suffering that is part of everyones life. Again, competitive sports is the natural and best way to do this.
None of the things discussed above are possible unless the games have a goal powerful enough to motivate the players to push themselves past their imagined limits, out of their comfort zones, and into territories of the self they don't know they possess. The desire to win the game is the only goal that can do this. This leads me to my last point: 'fun' as a goal.
This only occurred to me as I was thinking about what I wanted to say here. I just saw a currently popular starlet on TV talking about her new project. Her main point was doing it would be fun. I realized that I do the same thing at work: "Let's propose a new sensor for this call. It would really be a fun project." Fun has become a safe and acceptable goal and motive for all actions. Fun is casual, light, not important, and we don't have to care too deeply about the outcome. Failure would only mean the loss of something fun. Not a big deal. If we do something because it's fun, we don't really care that much, and aren't called upon to invest much or commit much. I realized that "fun" is merely a way to divorce yourself from the act of caring about an outcome. This is not noble or worthwhile. We've made caring about an outcome a bad thing, something to feel shame or embarrassment about. When we feel a surge of joy that the Twisters have beaten the Avalanche, there's guilt in the mix, like we're shallow for caring. This is transmitted to our kids.
We are teaching them to feel bad (at least a little) for caring about winning, and by extension, for winning (succeeding) as such. This is a bad thing, IMO.
This soccer team is a golden opportunity to teach our kids some vital skills, virtues, character traits, and lessons for their life. We should be teaching them what winning is and what it isn't, how to win so that it means something, and what will rob victory of meaning. We need to put them in situations where they are called upon to practice the virtues we esteem and the character traits we want them to possess. We should push them to step out of their comfort zones and find the inner strengths they will need to enable them to perservere and struggle on in the face of the slings and arrows of life. And we need to teach them that it's ok to care, and that "fun" is not the be-all and end-all of life.