A note to sports… “Just Lose, Baby!” : The Neglected Value of Defeat in Youth Sports
Dear Sports Community,
If you grew up in the East Bay this rallying cry was everywhere. Extolled by the Oakland Raiders legendary owner Al Davis, it is held as a peak of sports chutzpah. Glorified and celebrated, it sums up the idea that athletes and teams should be praised for their triumphs and achievements. Winning isn’t just the goal of sports. It is the entire point of playing.
For Al Davis, winning made business sense. His business was sports and winning brought more people to the games.
But what of the rest in the sports world? The vast majority of us who are amateurs or who serve kids and have ideals of developing youth? Should winning be the goal of sports, let alone the point? A cursory look at child and adolescent development studies would suggest not.
Rather, instead of winning, the goal should be losing. And losing a lot.
For those who just choked on their whistle, consider the following:
Youth sports on their own are vehicles for child development. Even for the narrowest minority of kids who become professionals, sports are a classroom to overcome challenges and learn valuable life skills, especially resilience and grit. Sports are fantastic at providing opportunities to develop resilience by putting kids in pressure filled situations where the outcome is dependent on their decisions and actions.
In those situations where kids' actions lead to success, or wins, the joy of victory is rewarded and it feels great for all. Failure is avoided and high fives are all around.
In the situations where kids' decisions and actions lead to loss, the pain of disappointment is felt and the challenge of overcoming that pain is presented. Losses are tough to feel, especially at a young age.
It’s these moments of seemingly intense pain that offer the most valuable lessons that sports can provide. When Angela Duckworth’s book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance came out in 2016, it was an instant bestseller. Especially amongst anxious parents concerned about how their kids would get ahead. Grit seemingly unlocked the code to succeed and a key part of developing Grit was bouncing back from failure.
Taken together, you would think that the same parents who analyzed Grit would be begging for harder challenges and more opportunities for their kids to bounce back from defeat. Youth sports clubs would be marketing their tough losses and hard practices as much as their tournament championships and trophies.
Yet that is rare. Rather, as the youth sports world continues to be professionalized, the values of sports business overwhelm youth sports development. The joy of Winning confers immediate value upon the service that a parent bought for their child in the form of youth sports. The agony of defeat makes you question why you drove to the middle of nowhere and go to those practices in the rain, and pay to do it. The pressure and focus on winning overwhelms even the most chill of sports parents at some point and completely blinds the true value of losing.
But why?
If we were to think logically, that opportunity to taste defeat and failure and pain amidst a field 2 hours from our warm bed is ten times more valuable than any win could be. It provides the challenge to overcome, the opportunity to get up and move on, the opportunity to breathe and not be overwhelmed, to realize that “This too, Shall pass.”
It’s that ability to overcome that predicts success. That ability to face disappointment and bounce back. That ability to hear no and not melt. That ability to have difficult conversations with yourself and with others. And nothing develops that better, than losing.
Just Lose, Baby. You’ll end up winning a lot more if you do.
Best-
Tyler