The Advantages of Adversity

If you have the misfortune of being a Minnesota sports fan, you are all to familiar of the failure of some of your favorite sports team. Vikings have failed four times to win a Super Bowl. The Twins, did this fall, final bring to an end the curse of losing eighteen straight playoff games and I won't even bring up the futility of the Timberwolves.

Failure or losing has become so distasteful that some members of our society will do almost anything to deny it, rationalize it, and or deny responsibility for it. I think it is unfortunate some of us seem to miss the potential positive learning opportunities failures can be used for.

Our culture seems obsessed with affixing blame to whom ever they believe deserves the responsibility for what we perceive to be a failure. Now that said. When was the last time you heard a politician, and I mean ANY politician, take responsibility for their failures? Don't hold your breathe.

Some of us adults have made it part of our parental resume to try and prevent our children from having to take responsibility for any of their actions. The school adminstration, teachers & certainly coaches are easy "scap goats." Deferring responsibility for failure has become another national pass time.

We have over looked the benefits of failure. Failure keeps your hat size the same size. It can remind you that the biggest room in your personal house is the room for improvement. We used to play a number of summer tournaments & some of the time we played teams that taught us some very valuable lessons in humility. We, for a number of years, dominated our conference & were contenders to win our sectional tournament which meant your team would advance to the state tournament. It would have been much less expense & been a lot more convenient to have stayed close to home in the summer & played teams we played (and most often dominated) during the season. I wanted our team to compete against some teams that would remind us we

were not as good as we thought we were.

Besides the benefit of keeping a person humble, failure can force you to face reality. You, can & need to, face the reality that YOU were part of the failure. I NEVER blamed an individual for a lose. My first assessment after a lose was what did I do or not do that contributed to our loss. Failure can & should be a learning tool. What did you learn from failing? You or your team has weaknesses that you can get away with if your competition is not very good. Living within the false assumption you do not need to improve.

If you are part of a team when you fail, you have the privilege of failing, not just yourself, but also learn you may have failed others (teammates) who depended on you. Hopefully, your teammates will not blame you but offer support not criticism. Whether it made any difference or not, when I addressed the team about High School League rules & the penalities for violation, I emphasized that if an individual player commited a violation that person was selfish & letting his/her team down. Personal responsibility is a character trait well worth reinforcing in your players.

I have mentioned this before, but I will state it again. I more than once told my team, & more often individual players, that I had screwed up (failed them). I felt it was important example to them that their coach would take personal responsibilily for failure(s) he/she committed.

My personal opinion is we fail as coaches & as parent(s) when we do not take advantage of those moments of failure to teach important life lessons. I know it may sound trite but the real sadness of failure is directly related to our personal failure to use those times of failure to teach lessons so important to helping those we teach become responsible individuals.

There is goal tending and then again there is goal tending!