Of the 50 to 60 youth sports teams I have coached over the years, a handful made it to the championship game and won it all; several fell short in the finals or semifinals; one team won only one game; and another didn’t win a single game. You might assume that I consider those winning seasons to be my most successful ones, and in one sense (the "winning" sense), you would be right.
A youth athletic team’s win-loss record, however, is only one of many ways to judge the effectiveness of the team’s coach. Indeed, I regard the season where my team won just one game as one of my most successful seasons overall.
This was in 1995, when I was the 27-year-old coach of a fifth-grade basketball team at Derby Academy in Hingham, Mass. Even though that team of unathletic beginners kept on losing, the players gave their all at every practice, showed dramatic improvement in their skills, had a lot of fun playing with each other and arrived at each game believing they had a chance to win. We did get our lone victory — finally — on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer in the season’s last game, and that one win solidified lifelong lessons for those boys. I’m still proud of that season because I know that I coached well and achieved many important goals (though most of the "winning" goals proved to be out of our reach). The team didn’t receive a big plaque at the winter awards banquet and we weren’t highlighted in the school’s spring magazine, because our win-loss record was pitiful. But our record didn’t tell the whole story of our season — in fact, it told hardly any of the story.
The same is true of the most dominant team I ever coached, back in the summer of 2007. This was a baseball team of very good 9- and 10-year-olds, including my eldest son. We had practices or games five nights per week, and we ended up going 20-2-1 and winning the league championship. At the end of the championship game, the kids were presented with their championship trophies and they all felt really marvelous. All of us coaches high-fived and embraced — after all, we were champion coaches, and we had helped to give our children and their teammates the unique feeling of being champions.
Being the last team standing is just such a rare achievement, and it’s a fantastically simple, no-nonsense way to evaluate the success of a team’s season. But we coaches knew that the success of our season could not be defined only by our win-loss record or the fact that we had won the league championship. Winning was the goal that our players strove for, but it was never the point of our coaching, and the allure of winning makes this easy to forget.
The point of every season, regardless of the scoreboard or the standings, is having fun. The point is improving young players’ physical skills. The point is teaching them how to think — before the game and in every game situation. The point is teaching kids the value of practicing in the right way. The point is teaching them to play as a team. The point is teaching them to never give up, and to bounce back from disappointing plays or games. The point is improving their resilience and focus. The point is developing leaders. The point is teaching kids to have the courage to dream about winning but to avoid becoming attached to that outcome. The point is teaching them to cheer for each other and keep each other "up" at all times. The point is teaching them to stay loose and to smile. The point is giving kids an experience, through a series of practices and games, that not only gives them joy today — for joy’s sake — but also helps them to grow into happier, more self-confident people, better equipped to face challenges in the future.
The goal of winning simply gives good youth athletic coaches a context for teaching all of these other vastly more important lessons.
