Happy Sunday Everyone-
This one boggles my mind a bit. A good friend of mine called me on Friday Morning and asked if I had heard about the freshman football game Thursday night (his son plays on the team). I hadn’t heard anything, but we were playing our cross-town rivals (freshman on Thursday, JV/Varsity on Friday). Based on the record, we went 0-3, their program is currently better than ours. The cross-town rivals were beating our freshman team 28-7 with 7 seconds left and had the ball inside the 15-yard line. One might think “we all live in the same town, we all frequent the same spots, we’re all friends outside of a little rivalry, we support each other’s businesses, we even go to the same churches”, maybe it would be a good idea to be good winners and kneel to end the game. Instead their coach decided to go for a 15 yard pass for one more touch down…pretty bad….not over….on top of that, let’s go for the two point conversion…yes that seems like a good idea, got that one too, well done brother, and you know…just to see if you can win the Danville ass of the year award, let’s go for an onside kick to top it off, congratulations on that one too. For the record-if it was our team who was on the winning side, I promise you, I’d be writing the same Sunday Thoughts about our team and our coach, and then I’d tell Thomas he should feel like a complete and utter loser for being an embarrassingly crappy winner. You can win and lose at the same time. Happens all the time. What are you teaching your kids when you do this?
I did a little research before writing this as I didn’t want to be completely off base if this was provoked, nothing in my findings would suggest this to be the case. So, I’m done ranting about the high school freshman football game but there are some life lessons to take away from this one. Some things that cross my mind:
- Humility-I don’t think many people think about winning and humility in the same sentence, yet I don’t think there is anything more attractive than a humble winner. I’m going to call a spade a spade, I’d like to have more people rooting for me than rooting against me, humility is a very good starting point to get there. I like humble people; I don’t like arrogant people. Win with humility and people cheer you on, win with arrogance and the world is rooting against you.
- Perspective-I see something happen like this and the thought of “you won the battle, but you lost the war” comes to mind. You win a freshman high school football game (the battle), but taught a bunch of impressionable young men how to be terrible winners (the war). I can be overly emotional, I can snap, I can get pissed. It’s gotten better over the years, but I have it in me. When I take a step back, which I now do more often, it allows me to gain perspective on the bigger picture. When I’m able to do that, it’s almost guaranteed the emotional snap decision i was going to make is not the end decision I made when I gain perspective.
- What are you looking for in a coach? I’ve been a business coach for 12 years. I’ve watched Jack/Thomas w/ multiple coaches. Hearing about Thursday night, and writing this now, makes me think about how intentional you need to be about what you’re looking for in a coach. For all I know that guy is an incredible football coach on executing offense and defense and teaching kids’ football, I think I’d probably skip over anything else he was offering. As I seek out new council as I discussed a couple weeks ago, it’s a relevant question to ask, “what specifically am I looking for in a coach or a mentor?” and then does that person represent the qualities I’m looking for. With my own boys, I’d probably have been more intentional to say, “this coach does X, Y, Z, really well, anything else, please come to me”.
Net net-this whole thing is sad, and stupid. It’s an embarrassment to our community, no matter what side of the field you’re on, but we can all learn from it and be better for it. The best winning you can do is being gracious and humble. There is nothing better than seeing an opponent help their competition off the ground after crushing them. If that’s makes me soft, whatever, I’ll take it. This example today just makes me wish (and pray) for all of us to be a little better.
Worth noting, their varsity team smoked us Friday Night, 34-7. We fumbled the ball with 1 minute left leaving them on their own 5-yard line (easy possible score). They kneeled w/ class. Is it any coincidence that the freshman game ended in a fist fig, and the varsity game ended w/ me taking pictures of Thomas w/ his friends from the other team on the field? Strange how that all works.