Our kids have played many different sports growing up and I had the
opportunity to coach them at soccer and basketball. It is interesting
to listen to them because when they talk about the past games, many of
the games are not the glory victories but actually the close defeats.
They talk about the fun of playing better and more competitive teams.
They talk about how they could have won that game. They talk about
their effort.

One of the great advantages of having team web sites is you can write
a very positive article after a defeat and the kids fell better about
the defeat.

At <a href="www.seasonplaner.com">www.seasonplanner.com</a> we are
seeing the best coaches and team parents doing this all the time.

Ken Barley
SeasonPlanner.Com

I have made that point many times in my team articles.  It, and the
ease of printing certificates for anything you like (good game
encouragements), are two standout features of SesaonPlanner that
separate it from every other baseball (and even sport in general)
program out there.  As the years go by, I continue to marvel at how
useful this program continues to be.

As an aside, very often debates about the primacy of winning divide
people into two camps: "play for the fun of the game" and "winning
isn't everything, it's the only thing." I believe this is a false
division.  In competitive sports, every boy's and team's goal is to
win.  Basically, if someone's keeping score, you're supposed to try to
win.  Adults may feel that the possibility of defeat is too intense
for a child to handle, but the truth is the opposite: In a child's
world, competitive sports are possibly the only area left to them
where there is something risked.   Every other aspect of their world
has been so highly regulated.  The fact that so many children seek out
competitive sports shows how much they have a thirst for these
experiences.  They generally handle winning and losing quite well.

The real trick, as Ken notes, is that coaches must be sure to point
out that winning is a goal, indeed the central organizing and
motivating principle, but it is not the yardstick by which teams
should be evaluated.  It is in the trying to win, rather than the
winning itself, that the spirit of competitive sport lives.  This can
be a subtle distinction, and in my experience it eludes a fair number
of adults, but it is critical to successful youth coaching (and
parenting in general).  I have found game and season summaries in the
SeasonPlanner package to be a very valuable tool in getting this
message across, especially so in highlighting the things we succeeded
at even in the games we lost.

To close, some may suspect that we are a team (currently 10-U
baseball) so used to losing that we have developed this tidy little
rationalization for it.  While, as I have written, we do not consider
the won-loss record as our yardstick (it depends on the other team,
too, and we have no control over them), that doesn't mean we have lost
the ability to add.  We are 52-14-5 over the last 4 seasons (3 seasons
with 3 or fewer losses) in a highly competitive league, have won three
of the four season-ending tournament championships, and my all-stars
team (2006 10-U) won half of it's tournaments (making the playoff
rounds in five of six tournaments).  We have certainly won our share,
and then some.

The thing I have always found intriguing is that the more we de-
emphasize wins and losses, the more winning we tend to do, in more
ways than one....

Yours Truly,

Brad

On Jul 13, 12:26 pm, Ken Barley <sa...@seasonplanner.com> wrote: