Win at all costs...

Sure the fuck not when it comes to dealing with the fragile personalities of grade seven and eight girls.

When I originally got into coaching many years back I coached with an I-don't-care attitude if I win or lose. Somewhere a long the way I have lost that. By nature one of my biggest personality shortfalls has always been when I play I hate losing, but that is not the way I want to coach. The problem with the culture of school sport in our area is that many schools have the win-at-all-cost attitude when it comes to their athletics program. Why? Because their athletic departments are run by competitive people by nature. I am not shooting down these athletic departments by saying this.

It is just what happens when competitive people take over and run sports programs. Their programs are a reflection of who they are. How do their volleyball teams compete? Is their basketball team as good as the rest of their athletic programs? If you walk in the gym and see a zillion banners across their walls for year after year of athletic excellence you automatically think...wow, they must have an excellent athletic director and great coaches? This is especially what happens when you see that the banners aren't related to just one year of success. This past weekend, I decided that I was going back to the old, "just play all the girls all the time regardless of ability." Unfortunately, that doesn't work best in the minds of the better players.

The want to win. If I play mostly weak players and we get killed the better players sitting on the bench will wonder why they are not subbed into the game to rectify the situation. It's an attitude that has been bread into our students, by our coaches as well as by the club team coaches they play for outside the school. That is exactly what happened this past weekend. We got slaughtered by a team because I just played a bunch of lesser talented players just so they could play and some of the girls cried after the game. They cried because they felt they had to prove to the better girls on the bench that they could play as good. What? I didn't care if we got beat up. I was cheering the weaker players on telling them what do next time if they made a mistake.

I am quitting this shit. My personal philosophy on young children's athletics has outgrown the philosophy of our school as well as most of the schools in B.C's lower mainland. If they want to play that competively then they should play for club teams where all the elite players end up. In the end, I don't go home after a loss feeling shitty about the loss, I feel shitty if one of the girl's on the team feels shitty that they didn't play good enough to win.