Tag Archives: Competing

“Winning is not a sometime thing: it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do the right thing once in a while; you do things right all the time. Winning is a habit.”  -Vince Lombardi

This quote from Coach Vince Lombardi sat at the top of every Clay Center Community High School summer conditioning, winter conditioning, and baseball offseason workout sheet I put into the world. You want to know what sits at the core of my parenting, coaching, working, writing, and life philosophies? It’s pretty much all in that quote (Plus, I’d add “smile and try to be nice” in there somewhere).

If you’re a regular reader of The Coach Hays blog, you might wonder what sort of burr attached itself to Hays’ backside to get him so worked up about competing and winning and losing. I owe you at least that since you’re taking a few minutes of your valuable time to read this.

Here’s the deal. A week or so, I ran into a young man who is going to be a freshman next year. I asked him if he was excited about summer conditioning and being a part of the high school program. He said he was but that he was very nervous. I told him that was okay. It’s good to be nervous because it means you care enough to want to do a good job. He looked at me sideways and provided the classic and wise response of a rising eighth grader, “Whatever…”

I ignored the lack of enthusiasm in his response and continued on to ask how many in his class were going to play. He paused, counted the fingers on one hand and deftly moved to count the fingers on the other. Half expecting either the right shoe or the left to be shed next, he answered, “I think there’s only going to be about six.”

“SIX!” I responded.

He answered in the affirmative, although taking a step away from me slightly shocked at the intensity in my response.

I took a few deep breaths and asked him why so few.

For the record, I can live with just about any excuse for not wanting to play a sport or participate in an activity. Everyone has their own interests, likes, and dislikes. Football, especially, is not for everyone. I’m honestly and truthfully a supporter of kids doing what they enjoy. If there are only six kids who want to do the work and enjoy playing the game the right way, so be it. But this excuse I heard sucked the life out of me.

“They don’t want to lose.”

It made my coaching heart hurt to hear this.

What was left out of the youth sports experience for these kids? Did they not experience or learn the joy of sports lies in the joy of competing? Where is the system did they not learn that failure is part of becoming a “winner”.

I thought of all the things I’d do if I were their coach. I thought of the quote from Vince Lombardi for the first time in several years. I thought of the years coaching and the fun we had competing and preparing. I thought of all those football and baseball games where we went into the contest knowing we always had a chance for success because we prepared the best we could.

Somewhere along the line, did these kids miss playing in such an environment? If so, I don’t know where or when or who. It doesn’t matter. There are no fingers that need to be pointed. All that matters is these situations is that it can be changed in an instant. A coach or a parent or a program director can change the philosophy from a pure win/lose focus to one where the focus in on getting better every day by being challenged every day.

Failure is all part of the process of achieving success. Dream big, fail, regroup, work, and try again. Repeat until you succeed and then dream bigger.

My hope and my expectation are that these dozen or so young athletes will eventually change their mind and continue to participate in football next fall. My advice to them is to give it a try and get past the fear of the unknown that comes with a big life change from middle school to high school.

Coaches, parents, and athletes. It’s up to you to make things better.

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing.

You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do the right thing once in a while; you do things right all the time.

Winning is a habit.

Develop good habits and good things will happen. Keep the focus on improvement, not W’s and L’s. In the end, if you learn just this one thing from sports, you will be a winner…no matter what your won-loss record was.

Hard work is the magic.

Something’s been bugging me lately. On the surface, it’s sports related. Scratch the surface, though, and it seeps into many problematic areas of American life in 2019. Sports, academics, parenting, politics, etc.

Competing.

• Trying hard things.
• Challenging yourself and accepting being challenged.
• Winning.
• Losing.
• More important, winning and losing with class and respect for the opponent.

I’m calling this post “Competing: Part One” because I foresee several posts on this subject. I think I have things to say, things to work out, things to question, and things to learn. To kick off this exploratory project of the problem of competing, here is a post I wrote in 2013.

When Everyone Wins, Nobody Wins

There’s a trend in amateur sports which threatens a healthy future and perhaps even their survival as we know them. This disturbing trend is the misconception that competing means winning.

Behind this philosophy, we are eroding the joy in competing. We are smashing the inherent joy of working hard for a goal, by lowering the bar to give everybody the “win”. We continually are diluting the competitive structure to allow the most winners. Let’s hand out a ribbon to everybody, whether they earned it or deserved it. That’s unhealthy.

One of my favorite movies is THE INCREDIBLES. One of the best lines in the movie is when the antagonist, Syndrome, tells Mr. Incredible he is creating superpower technology he’ll eventually sell to normal people. Syndrome says, “When everyone’s super, no one will be.”

Is that where we are going? Are we headed in the direction where only winning matters, so we need to make sure we create a system where everyone wins? That, my friends, is not a system which promotes the values and life lessons intended by sport. Teamwork flies out the door and the disciplined and dedicated approach to self-improvement soon follows. The reward for preparation is severely discounted. Using failure, or the potential of failure, to drive a desire to improve is swept under the rug.

Honestly, most of the true innate joy in sports is in competing. The joy of competing is in the working of one’s tail off to get better day after day in practice. The joy is in the going out on the field to give every last milligram of fight and intensity to compete with purpose, pride, and passion, win or lose. That’s what competing is.

Wins and losses will fall where they may, the competitive effort awards the athlete to a higher degree than any medal or trophy or ribbon. In fact, as much can be learned about oneself from a defeat as from a victory. Three of the most talked about football games in our tenure (even years after the games were played) were against 4A state powerhouse Holton Wildcats. These three games were massive, epic battles, games which felt like two rams rearing back and hammering horns together for four quarters.

These boys, now men, still talk about those games with a gleam in their eye. Do you know the common factor in those three Holton games? We lost. We played out heart out, we fought against the odds, we ignored the preconceived notion we were underdogs and vastly over-matched. We still lost. We ENJOYED those games enough to remember every detail ten years later, despite the final score.

THAT is what I am afraid to lose as we slide down the gravel slope to the pit where competing = winning.

In fact, I felt we found out more about who we were as human beings in how we responded to a defeat. We found out so much about ourselves as players and coaches by how we picked ourselves up from the muck of failure and worked to become something better. And for us adults, who’ve survived our share of hardships in life, isn’t that a great lesson for young athletes to learn?

Athletes remember the competition. The defeats and the victories often fade over time, but that feeling of having competed to the maximum of one’s abilities leaves a trail of satisfaction and has staying power.

As parents, coaches, and administrators let’s turn the tide, let’s once again turn our focus to the promotion of competition, instead of a focus on winning. We don’t need to eliminate losing. We don’t need to a ribbon or a trophy to be a winner.

We need the joy of competing to the best of our ability to make us winners.