As I said in an earlier post,

I believe that coaching is a noble profession.  For it to truly be noble though, the work and the games have to be about more than wins and losses.  I told my teams all the time:  ‘if what we do out here is only about how many games we win, then athletics needs to be taken out of the curriculum…..it has to be about more than that’.  We as coaches, have to make it all about more than how many games we win.

Here is what is really hard about maintaining that perspective:  if you put a ‘win’  and a ‘loss’ on a balance scale, it will not balance out.  The loss ‘weighs’ more or hurts more to a coach…..and, they pile up faster.  A 3-game losing streak seems like an eternity, while a 3-game winning streak seems to happen in a flash.  I think that most competitive athletes or coaches will tell you that losing hurts worse than winning feels good.  I know that is the way that I felt…there were many times over the course of my career that a win wasn’t necessarily a celebration, but more of a relief that we didn’t lose.

The thing is, I recognized this, and realized the perspective that I should have.  But, it is the intrinsic nature of a competitive person to want to win.  And, we all want to avoid the hurt of losing.   Then you throw in the outside pressures of unrealistic perspectives/expectations of parents, administration, school boards, etc….it is even more brutal and more difficult to maintain the proper perspective.

Given all that, it is easy to see why it is incredibly hard to keep the game in the proper perspective.  But, maintaining a proper perspective when it comes to wins and losses is one of the most important traits you can possess as a coach, in my opinion…….if you find yourself caring more about wins, than you do about kids, you’re done.  You will start compromising principles and making long term decisions based on short term thoughts.

One of the pieces of advice that I got when trying to figure out how to write a blog, was to keep my entries fairly short.  So, I have some thoughts on how to maintain a proper perspective that I will post in the next entry.