We all praise winners and try to teach our children to be winners, but often our greatest lessons come from defeat.
By Simon Lewis
TEACH YOUR KID TO BE A GOOD LOSER
Good losers make good winners, strange as that might sound. Sport is likened to war by a great many people, but it will never be like war. War sees mothers and fathers killed and innocent children and animals slaughtered in the name of (in most cases) pretty pathetic reasons. So sport is not war – you’re allowed to be friendly to the opponents off the field, and respectful on the field.
So what exactly does being a GOOD LOSER on the sports field entail?
Perhaps your rugby team is being thrashed 45-3 by the local private school’s rugby elite with 15 minutes to go, or your soccer side is 4-0 down to Chelsea. Either way you know it’s game over – you’ll never eat back the deficit in the time available against such a mighty opponent. Most teams would draw long faces, start infighting or resort to dirty tactics in frustration at their sporting fate. That’s a very normal and typical reaction, but it doesn’t serve your side well in the short term or the long term. In the heat of ‘battle’ it’s natural to drift into such a negative approach, which is why it is essential for the players to be managed to be prepared for such a situation and be ready to make the most of it. In essence, they need to be ready to be good losers.
THE MATCH SITUATION
You will be in a situation where you can almost certainly not win a match in the time remaining. However, you CAN learn from those remaining 20 minutes and you CAN grow as a player in such a ‘hopeless’ situation. Forget winning or the fact that you are GOING TO LOSE. Allow yourself to just enjoy each moment of the match and indulge your sporting spirit by getting stuck into the pure intensity of raising your game for each tackle, each pass, shot or header. Get WINNING and RESULTS and LEAGUE TABLES out of your head: this is sport, and this is hopefully the closest to war you’ll ever come – so start battling.
TELL YOUR KIDS
Sport is about having a long-term goal but, to achieve that, you need to keep growing each day and each match, so it’s essential to keep loving what you do and playing with passion. Use the last 20 minutes of a lost match to raise yourself to compete with the stronger opposition and get used to being adventurous and taking on their players, man-to-man or woman-to-woman. Allow yourself the opportunity of doing something unusually adventurous that you could not justify trying in such a match when the score is still at 0-0 and there’s ‘so much to play for’.
When next in your life will you have such a chance? Learn and enjoy from every sporting moment you can, for tomorrow you retire (and the next day you die!). Now, here, today, you have a match against Chelsea / Sri Lanka / Grey Bloem – and the average player will only have that chance 15-20 times in his or her career, so such an opportunity is an endangered species. Catch your opportunities, thrill to the excitement of the opportunity, and make the most of each and every one.
© SIMON LEWIS • The Ball magazine
simon@theball.co.za • www.theball.co.za
