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Winning without Winning

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...................................................viiA NOTE ON THE TEXT.................................................viiiINTRODUCTION.......................................................xiI: THE WAKE-UP CALL................................................1II: YO! WHAT'S UP?.................................................6III: HEROES, HEROINES, EVERY ONE!..................................13IV: GOT COACH?.....................................................19V: I LOVE THESE LITTLE PEOPLE......................................24VI: CODE OF BEHAVIOR...............................................31Sportsmanship - 1st precept........................................32How to Win / How to Lose - 9th & 16th precepts.....................36How to Compete - 11th precept......................................43VII: PARTICIPATION.................................................46Setting Goals - 18th precept.......................................47Teamwork - 3rd precept.............................................51Being Fair - 5th precept...........................................56Leadership - 10th precept..........................................61VIII: DEVELOPMENT OF SKILLS........................................66Physical Skills - 2nd precept......................................67Learning The Game - 4th precept....................................73Physical Fitness - 12th precept....................................76IX: PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS..........................................79Discipline and Self-Control - 7th precept..........................80Motivation - 8th precept...........................................84Patience - 13th precept............................................88Resilience - 19th precept..........................................92X: THE THREE R's...................................................96Respect - 14th precept.............................................97Reliability - 15th precept.........................................101Responsibility - 17th precept......................................103XI: WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT............................................110Having Fun - 6th precept...........................................111Perspective - 20th precept.........................................118XII: CONCLUSION....................................................121

Chapter One

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ... then you will be a man, my son." - Rudyard Kipling

I had a theory, albeit an untested one, and I was excited about gathering support for it. Each year at the children's year-end baseball tournament there were fights and ejections. One year, during the six-year-olds' tournament, a parent became so abusive he had to be removed from the field by police. Can you imagine the looks on the faces of the players to see an adult placed in a police cruiser and taken away? How must his child have felt? I was determined that this should never happen again.

To that end I held a seminar focusing on a new perspective-awareness. Twenty-eight adults attended, most of them coaches. The results were surprisingly predictable. How can something be both surprising and predictable? The outcome was a surprising reminder that all too often the obvious objectives of youth sports were not being achieved.

I began by welcoming everyone to a new concept-winning without winning. I explained that my goal was to make coaches aware of what was required of them when they decided to coach children.

I started by asking, "What are a coach's duties?"

A discussion followed about being on time, having the equipment there, etc. Then I asked a different kind of question: "What should coaches be teaching children?" The lively dialogue that resulted suggested I had hit a nerve.

So, we brainstormed-the same kind of brainstorming used in business and industry. Each participant wrote down a list of five things coaches should teach kids. (We'll discuss these in detail later in this book.) How often are you driving in the car or just drifting off to sleep and something really important pops into your mind? You think you'll remember it later, or in the morning, but most often it simply vanishes from your thoughts-unless you write it down. It is certainly too easy to forget unless you see it in black and white. Furthermore, an idea is futile unless it's implemented and writing ideas down is the first step to ultimately achieving goals. Coaches are naturally creative and insightful. Their ideas contribute to the success of their leagues and the enjoyment of the players. It only made sense that the coaches themselves could shed light on what is best for their players. The collective thoughts of the coaches were necessary to identify those issues.

So each individual picked up his or her pencil and began. The only stipulation was that they had to begin with the sentence "I believe coaches should be teaching kids ..." and then continue with the list. During our discussion, and after, the feedback was fantastic. In fact, the next day I had one coach call to tell me that because of that seminar, she realized that the principles that coaches should teach young athletes are the same principles that parents should teach their children. She had had an ongoing family dispute with her teenage daughter whereas she and her daughter had not spoken to each other in two weeks. She applied the brainstorming principle to her family situation by asking herself what she should be teaching her child. She took the next step by implementing the changes required to remedy the conflict, and the results were successful. She and her daughter were, once again, on good terms.

This coach, as well as her peers, had become students themselves. They had learned new concepts at the seminar and practiced what they learned on the ball fields. Each game showed improved attitudes and by that year's final tournament a new mind-set had emerged. Most coaches remembered that the children were there to improve personal skills and, above all, to have fun.

During one particularly tense tournament game, an umpire was out of position and made an indisputably incorrect call. The wronged team was upset and trouble seemed imminent. Then the unexpected happened. The coach called his infield together at the pitcher's mound and in a loud voice proclaimed, "Boys, we're here to have fun. Forget the call." Forget the call? We were all dumbstruck. Mouths dropped and eyes blinked in disbelief. A look of astonishment appeared on the faces of the kids. A bad call by an umpire didn't matter?

What a pleasant change from angry words, elevated stress levels, teary eyes, hurt feelings and damaged egos. The calm was the result of simple words that demonstrated a simple philosophy, spoken by a man who, days earlier, would have lost his temper. The seminar had given this coach the opportunity to be made aware that his past outbursts were unsuccessful in getting umpires to reverse calls, as well as also ineffective in teaching children. He not only eliminated his inappropriate behavior, he replaced it with positive, constructive advice.

Was it magic? Was it a miracle? Whatever you call it, this simple philosophy needed a broader audience. So, after countless meetings, endless discussions, and an unfaltering belief, Winning without Winning was created.

FOR PARENTS AND...