I recently had the honor of coaching a U9 lacrosse team. As a culminating event to our season, we participated in a two-day tournament with several other Metro Atlanta teams. The weather was beautiful, the competition was great, and the players were excited to be there.
However, as I coached our games and watched several others, I began to notice a troubling pattern.
When teams faced adversity and ultimately lost a game, storm clouds seemed to roll in despite the cloudless skies. Parents would inevitably begin yelling at the other team, blaming the referees, or demanding some sort of retribution. Instead of greeting their children with a smile after the game, they would seek out a coach, referee, or another parent to express their frustration, all in plain view of their children.
I couldn’t help but wonder: What message are we sending our children?
Frustrated by what I was seeing, I was inspired to send the following message to the parents on my team:
- It’s always tough to end the season with a loss. However, losing can be such a positive learning experience for all of us.
- It’s easy to make excuses and justify a loss by blaming the referees, the other team’s aggressive style of play, the weather, or the bumpy, uneven playing field. But what does that actually accomplish?
- Sometimes, we simply need to accept that we scored fewer goals than the other team.
- Losing is becoming a lost art form.
- It’s our job to teach our players that it’s okay to come out on the short end, even if, as parents, we feel there was an unfair advantage. Let’s use the experience as motivation and reflect on what we can do, individually and as a team, to give ourselves a better chance next time.
- Let our children develop their own mechanisms for handling defeat. Allow our players to be kids and have fun. Let’s model gracious behavior in both victory and defeat.
- Following a tough loss, the last thing our players need is for us to dwell on it. Losing is not the end of the world.
Character is what will help our children become great people. That is priceless.
The way a child handles failure can help prepare them for the inevitable disappointments life will bring. One of the worst things we can do as parents is immediately respond to a disappointment with negative advice, excuses, or blame.
Sometimes, we simply need to let our children cope in their own way.
In my experience as a teacher and coach, a child generally needs about one or two minutes to recover from a loss. Then they want to move on. They want to play, have fun, grab something to eat, or maybe make a trip to Dairy Queen.
And isn’t that what youth sports should be about?
Our children don’t need us to make every loss feel like an injustice. They need us to teach them how to handle disappointment, shake it off, learn from it, and move forward.
So the next time the game doesn’t go our way, take a breath. Give your child a hug. Tell them you’re proud of them. Then let them be kids.
Together, let’s win back the art of losing.
