It was the late great Paul Dobson who said “Win as if you’ve
just lost, lose as if you’ve just won.”
He was speaking about school rugby and what he meant, I
think, is be humble in victory, be gracious in defeat. That’s a lesson to be learnt
from playing sport that’s going to serve you well throughout life, and the
adults who coach and organise youth sport should be teaching it, it's as
important as the technical and tactical details you try to get the children to
learn.
It’s in what happens after the game, often, that you can see
whether or not teams and individuals are operating on a foundation of solid
values. I like to watch the reaction of the winners and the losers on the final
whistle, educationally it’s probably the most important moment of the game. And
what happens around the ground in the minutes that follow – how the rest of the
learners, the parents, the old boy spectators and the coaches behave, that’s
the measure of whether there was class on display or not.
I’ve observed and wrote about examples on both sides of
the issue over the years. There were two more recently.
The bad was to be seen at Menlo Park when a clip from their
loss to Helpmekaar two weeks ago showed the post-match handshake line turning
into a full out brawl after one player apparently didn’t like what another one said or did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9c01aI0uuo
There’s a lot of emotion involved, I know, you wouldn’t be
doing your jobs at coaches if you didn’t make the players believe it’s important,
they have to be passionate and passion isn’t a tap that can be shut in an
instant. But there’s the lesson to be learnt. Win or lose, when it’s over it’s
over and there’s nothing to be gained by fighting on.
It worse when there’s an over-emphasis on winning. When
winning is your main value then it’s hard to accept defeat. When coaches roll
out the cliché that winning is the only thing, then what’s left when you lose?
Contrast that with what I saw at the Aitken hockey final on
Sunday afternoon (night actually, after lightning and loadshedding brought about
a two hour break between chukkas three and four).
I couldn’t describe it better than Adrian Carter of Saints:
Hockey doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. It’s
as hard a game as rugby and in my experience the hockey programmes in the top
schools are as professionally run as the rugby ones.
Yet, somehow, they seem closer to getting the balance right. They certainly
did in the games that I watched at the Aitken and Boden tournaments over the
weekend. Especially in the two finals.
