What Does Winning Look Like?
Winning is more than what is reflected on the scoreboard, particularly in youth sports.
When looking back on the history of organized sports clubs, you’ll quickly find that they were used as a tool to develop quality young people. Keeping that in mind is a positive first step to a healthy relationship with sports and youth sports.
What is Winning?
Watch this great video from Frank Dick, the British Athletics Federation's Director of Coaching from 1979 to 1994. Dick led the British Athletics team into its "golden era" with many Olympic gold medalists whom he personally coached and/or created training programs for:
Elite/High-Performance Youth
Wayne Goldsmith was a performance coach in Australia who was contracted by many of Australia’s Olympic committees to help identify talent and get that talent into a high-performance environment ahead of the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney, Australia.
After all his travels and experiences, he came to a simple conclusion:
There is no such thing as an elite 8-year-old, high-performance 10-year-old, or professional 11-year old.
Despite his immense background that would qualify him… he admits he had no idea how to identify the very young ones:
We don’t know, but I promise you that specializing them (players) too early is a road to doom.
Don’t worship physical talent. Physical talent is a poor indicator of long-term success. - Video source for Wayne’s quotes
What Does Winning Look Like?
Winning looks like being better today than you were yesterday. Winning looks like doing your best and striving toward better.
Winning is giving love, support, and praise toward great behavior instead of living and dying by scoreboard results.
Further Reading