We finished our season on Saturday and remained undefeated after a 4-0 win over Andes. John Hultenius' goal in the third quarter ricocheted off the inside post and rocketed into the back of the net. It was a left footed shot. He pumped his fist and said, "Mr. Kirby, I hit it with my stupid foot!"
Our team was excellent, and the coaching (if I do say so) was excellent, although there was philosophical discussion that lasted throughout the season not only between the coaches but between the players and parents.
This discussion was about who played, and the rationale. One philosophy, advanced by certain parents and certain officials in the league who shall remain unnamed, uttered the belief that all players should play the same amount of time. And all the kids should constantly be rotated into different positions. How could excellence be acknowledged if this was the case? I played our best goalie most of the time because she was the best goalie in the league and I knew I could count on her. Our backup goalie was also excellent, but didn't quite have the same field sense. We also tried to work a new goalie in because our two top goalies will go to to 7th grade next year and no longer be eligible for this league.
I had 19 players and only 11 spots on the team. This meant that even if I tried it would be difficult to get kids to play the same amount of time, and thinking about equality isn't my bag. I think better about quality.
The kids went from 4th through 6th grade. Some of the kids in 6th grade had tremendously developed skills. One could single-handedly take the ball down the entire length of the field. He could dribble through opponents' legs and leave them on the ground wondering what happened. Then he could flick the ball effortlessly into the net with the outside of his foot. Then he could do it again, and again. It was a pleasure to watch, and I wanted him to be a model for all the kids. He could also make spot-on passes. His name was Jasper Millhone, and he was a soccer genius.
Other kids were very tentative and shy and unsure of what to do. I tried to make them fierce and definite, and give them a clear sense. Partially, that comes from experience.
Many think that kids should not think about winning but only play "for fun." This philosophy makes sense to the degree that kids might otherwise overdo it and think that unless they win the game was meaningless. But the game is meaningless unless it has a meaning. The meaning has to be based on winning, and on excellence, which can only be measured by the final score.
All the practices and all the play has to be based on winning. Now of course it is possible to lose. If you lose, you deal with it, and try to get better, and you acknowledge that your opponent was superior in this instance. Losing isn't something to be sought out as an end in itself, any more than death is, even if everyone has to die. Everyone has to deal with death, eventually, but it doesn't mean you should just kill yourself.
I was told that, "Losing teaches humility."
Well, not if you do it on purpose, or didn't care. You have to have tried your best or the effort will not mean anything to anyone, and it doesn't teach humility it teaches passivity and numbness toward consequences.
As a kid I don't remember passivity in games as a possibility. This meant that some sports people went wild, and thought you had to destroy your opponent. I never liked football because of that philosophy. Soccer is the most played sport now. It fights obesity. It fights the dull thinking that nothing matters. It allows us to be aggressive but within certain rules. It teaches teamwork.
But the real point is to score a goal.
If you lose sight of this, you have lost sight of the meaning of life, or at least of this game.
A similarly stupid thing would be to have a company in which the point wasn't to make a profit. Or a country in which the point wasn't to stay on budget. Or to fight a war without any real notion of what it would mean to win. Or to help a bunch of ragtag idiots win a war who then declare you persona non grata, and start to launch terror attacks at your expense.
It would be like having sex with someone without reference to children, or at least to ultimate outcomes like pulling two people closer together. "Just have fun." This kind of amoral directive makes no sense at all outside of an amusement park. But life is not an amusement park. Turning sex into an amusement park in which poor consequences can be dealt with at the abortion clinic undermines any real seriousness in life.
More and more I think America is losing its underpinnings, its definition. People get so fat now that they have lost all their definition. It's fun to eat a hundred different kinds of food, but the point of eating is not to just enjoy the food. It's to nourish oneself. (I'm not totally against fun foods like jello or Twinkies but one shouldn't take them seriously, or think of them as an alternative to the main course, which ought to be based on protein, and the portions should be relevant to remaining healthy.)
Games and activities are getting redefined so that they no longer make any sense. Marriage is no longer about creating a family and nurturing it. It's not about fun. One of the reasons I love the Christians (serious Christians, by which I don't mean those who no longer respect the Ten Commandments, or think that the entire OT can be jettisoned in favor of "love") is that they still have God's definitions (God gave us the Ten Commandments). Art's tendency is to shock other people with its moral vulgarity, as if that should be an end in itself. A lot of this shock is based on deliberately defying the Ten Commandments. "Caught in a Bad Romance," by Lady Gag Gag, is about someone who has lost her sense of what she is doing in a relationship. It's revolting in every way. Lady Gag Gag is revolting. What she's in, even if it can be called a relationship, has no relationship to what anyone with a brain could call a relationship. How did idiots like this rise to prominence? La la blah blah blah, blah blah blah, la la, blah blah blah.
I blame it on our war in the 60s with the Vietnamese, and how Buddhism crossed and made us all into vapid idiots incapable of determining right from wrong, losing from winning, love from hate, war from peace. Marriage began to fray as adultery became a new contact sport in the 70s. And divorce became more and more popular and easy to achieve. Children of just whoever came to be the norm. It left the kids to fend for themselves. Love was no longer something defined by God as a fulfillment of His commandments, but was something like fun together, whatever on earth that means. Fun is a bizarre word, whose rise to prominence has accompanied the downfall of America. Satan is constantly having fun, like certain girls that were the subject of a popular song. What was fun about Christ or the disciples? They would not have recognized the term.
One of the things I liked about Herman Cain is that he has at least attempted to offer a few clear definitions, but unfortunately even he has a sense of humor which occasionally overwhelms him and gets out of his own control. He said he wanted crocodiles along the Mexican border, and a huge electric fence that said This Will Kill You. Both of these seemed like good ideas to me (they provided a clear definition) but now he's fading on them. He said he was against abortion, but now he says it's a personal decision. He said he was for the 9-9-9 plan, but then he amended it to 9-0-9.
Why not make it 9-1-1?
This country needs help. We need to work on clarifying our ideas and our sense of outcomes. I have friends who claim America is falling apart and who cares. Or America is so far in debt what's a few trillion more?
Our choice for president will probably end up being either Obama (a complete nothing who is probably a torpedo meant to scuttle the country's economy) or else Romney (who is a professional dodger, but who will not amount to the same thing because he has at least run a business, and has some sense of definition due to his religious faith).
The far left tries to tell us it's Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee. Take your choice. It isn't quite that.
I had hopes for Cain because he understood a few things clearly. He tried to speak clearly. He erred on the side of clarity. He was simple, but not stupid. He tried hard to bring us toward clarity. The big Zero will probably scuttle the poor fellow, but what a wonderful thing it was to have had a chance to turn America around with Cain. For once, we all sat up. There had been a clear proposal. The 9-9-9 plan. The whole country discussed it. Then it was rejected, even by its chief proponent.
At least in my corner of the world sanity prevailed. I had a clear plan and I stuck with it (although I was nearly ready to give up). I taught a few kids how to win at soccer, and we won every game as a result. We worked hard, had fun, and the older kids got to triumph but were happy for the younger kids' successes. This is how America is supposed to be, and is how America used to be in the 1950s. There were some problems in the 1950s, but there were also some good things. One is that we still had a sense of how to live and how to behave, and that was based on the Bible. Now it's all lost in the immoral haze of French philosophy, Zen Buddhism, and the ridiculous notion that having fun is the point of life, (which is the same as to say that it hasn't got one).
19 comments:
Kirby,
OK, great. You participated as a coach in a soccer league that is built around the notion that everyone gets to participate, so everyone gets a chance to improve their skills. And not understanding that the primary objective of the league is player development, you instead pursued the secondary objective of winning games as though it was the primary objective.
Unsurprisingly, you performed very well as measured by the objective you cared about, but this involved implicitly cheating less developed players out of the game time they needed.
The real metric of success for youth instructional leagues isn't wins and losses, it's how many of the participants chose to participate next season. It's just a guess, but I expect that there are eight kids (the ones who got limited playing time) who you've lost to soccer. And so your record, as measured by the real objective, is going to be close to 11-8, and that's a poor (and pyrrhic) record as these things go.
It will be interesting to see if the league allows you to coach next year.
Not exactly right at all. I played the younger kids more often against teams that we would easily defeat in order to keep the games close and to nevertheless develop the younger players. I think it's important to still teach the younger kids, but to allow the teams to win. All the coaches in the whole league tried to win, in spite of the notion that constantly floated that "fun" was the sole criterion. I think all the kids will be back, because what I found the most humiliating idea that was floated was that winning didn't matter, and thus these games and this team didn't really matter. It's like hiring someone even if you didn't have any genuine purpose for them. It's insulting to them, or should be. You should be able to profit from hiring someone which is to recognize their actual value rather than to give them lip service value that you don't really honor in your heart. I find this whole new notion of pretending that everyone is equal to be an affront to absolutely everyone. All notion of true value thereby goes out the window.
In fact, some of the younger kids played MORE -- especially when they could play BETTER.
There are a lot of conundrums in this, it is true. But I think that unless you teach the kids that winning is the essence, and then show them how to win, the game is absolutely meaningless to everyone, and no one (at least not my kids) want to come back.
They would rather play a real game that matters.
It IS problematic if you cheat kids of their time needed to develop. But to develop in a vacuum of values, such as the one that you posit, is not a true experience. It's worth nothing.
This is why I also found it insulting when you say on your blog that the rich have to hire without reference to anything other than doing good for the sake of doing it, rather than for the sake of some larger objective into which the employee can participate.
It's make-work.
I think that's an insult to everyone involved.
Kirby,
I consider this comment to be more fully developed in important ways than your (much longer) post.
First off, I agree that the point to playing any game is trying to win. Good sportsmanship implies trying to win within the rules and traditions of the game you're playing; as does good refereeing, but neither is an especially reliable constraint. Competition is an important motivator, and games are preparation for a life that's going to involve a lot of competition. Much of my critique of your position came from a perspective that you weren't being a good sportsman. This appears to be mistaken in part, but I'd argue that my understanding was based on what you wrote.
I do think that your substitution strategy (i.e., titrating the level of talent you put out on the field to the quality of the competition) is not exactly fair play, but this is a gray area if the less developed players had adequate opportunity to compete.
And I strongly disagree with your characterization of my position as being "without values." My values are often different from yours -- they're not absent.
As for my blog post, I most definitely did not suggest "make work." I explicitly said "meaningful work."
We had arduous discussions of quality assurance on all levels. I admittedly was a "work in progress" as one of the assistant coaches put it. I had a hard time with the logistical aspects of time and subbing. So after the first game we developed a system of cutting each of the four quarters in half. The first half of each quarter was given to me to direct, the second half was given to one of the assistants to make sure that everyone played and to spell winded players and so on. I think we got a pretty good system that allowed each system of values to be honored. I wanted to win. But I didn't want to do it at the expense of the coming years. But I also wanted to honor those who had been with the team for several years by giving them some extra playing team, especially if they could help the team to win.
It was awkward and complicated.
By the end there were no real complaints. Some of the very smallest players got MUCH better, and were still not scoring but were having genuine shots on goal in some cases they were hard shots even though they were right at the goalie in many cases which meant they were picked off.
I apologize if I missed the word "meaningful" in your post. I did. Meaningful I think has to be put in direct relationship to PROFITABLE, -- from each according to their ability as it is put in Matthew.
even in the parable of the talents one of those to whom talents were given did try but didn't make much profit. Still, he tried. This is good enough.
As I see it, God gives us talents and our job is to use these in our community. It's the very definition of fulfillment to be able to use the talents and to develop these as a crucial aspect of community building (whoring women out, or selling drugs ARE not part of this because they degrade the dignity of ALL who participate in them).
So there is a countervalent thread in Matthew that the rich shall not enter the kingdom of heaven except insofar as a camel can fit through the eye of a needle.
But I think he's talking about the lazy rich who use their talents solely for personal gratification or for no good (i.e., Paris Hilton).
We had one extremely talented player and he spent part of each game after we were ahead trying to get less talented players to score goals.
We all loved this. He was a Jewish kid.
I wonder for how many kids this will be the high point of their lives?
Wallowing in self-pity and their own filth in a bombed out bar remembering the day they went undefeated in a kiddie soccer league.
Kirby,
I feel as if we've made a lot of progress in a few comments.
Let's work our way back to the rich. I think that both sides of the partisan debate have equally erroneous models of the rich. From your side, the rich are pretty much OK, with a few exceptions like Paris Hilton (where the objection seems more rooted in a reaction to her sexual license than to her economic behavior, although I'll credit you with having said the right things). From my side, the rich are the folks who placed massive bets that ended up being of the form "heads I win, tails the government bails me out." They took our money, and called it their own. The parable of the unmerciful servant (Matthew 18:23-35) captures this critique nicely.
I've seen enough rich and poor people to know that there are meritorious folks in both camps, as well as slackers. Indeed, part of the way that I see our society differently than you do is that I believe that there's too little opportunity for merit to influence one's standing. Richness and poorness seem to be much, much more a function of your parent's economic state than of your merit. You accuse me wanting the level the field so that it is impossible for Steve Jobs or Bill Gates to arise. This entirely misconstrues my critique. I think there are far too few such, because the economic game as it is played today is rigged against merit and in favor of privilege.
You're a fan of competition. I'm fine with that, I'm a fan of competition too. But I don't believe that society is well served by allowing economic competition to take place under "winner takes all" rules. The Levitical injunction against gleaning the fields applies today, too, mutatis mutandis. Running up the score against a weak opponent is even poorer sportsmanship in life than it is in soccer, and it has far more damaging consequences.
It's true that we are coming very close to an agreement on this, Stu.
I don't know how this happened, nor do I know how to stop it.
It's probably just that we are both practical and sensible but use different terminology to express it and both of us would prefer to split hairs if given our druthers.
It's very hard to run a kids' soccer team. Each kid is not only unique but their parents are unique, and then in tandem the different kids play together in interesting combinations.
My idea was to play kids in working combinations. My one problem was greedy players. My great joy was kids who could play quick quick quick. The idea in soccer is double time it, buster. Too many of the kids wanted to process everything with logic before they moved.
The best kid for scoring was a kid who just moved instinctively toward the goal and creamed it. He got a goal in every game. Often this happened in the first 15 seconds of each game. The kid moved like heat lightning.
Note: Bill Gates' parents were, at the least, upper-middle class.
I see merit+ability+work ethic winning every time.
I don't know anyone who is unsuccessful who has had this combination since high school.
Now, I know some people who didn't catch the ball on merit+ability+work ethic until college or later (they were lazy, used drugs, etc.) who are now catching up (I was lazy, which cost me a lot of money for college--I wish now I hadn't been lazy but I was) but my friends who were always on the ball are successful, the ones who never were aren't and the ones who had 2 of these (or maybe 1.5) are doing better every day.
I don't know of a way to alleviate this other than encouraging people to have earlier and greater work ethics--but this isn't done through government handouts.
It could be done through the government but it's more of a viewpoint one has to learn and a nanny state's not going to teach it.
Yeah, kids should be allowed to compete and should try to win.
Parents of this generation have turned into helicopters who often destroy their kids' ability to persevere.
They have shifted the roll of the parent from 'keeping the child safe' to 'keeping the child comfortable and doing everything to have the child avoid emotional upset.'
Which is why we have sports without winning and parents who blame the teacher when a kid gets an F.
Hey kid - you're sad you got an F? Good. Hold onto that feeling, and avoid it by working hard and doing better in the future.
Instead, the parents say 'teacher made kid feel bad, attack teacher.'
You're sad you lost the game, or sad you didn't play enough? Work harder and gain perspective on what's important.
And feel bad for a while about it. That's fine. Kids are designed to get dirty, and have fallouts with their friends, and feel bad. And parents can guide them to help them gain the skills to avoid those situations that make them feel bad (perspective on winning / losing while also trying your hardest to get better). But when parents design their kids lives to take 'feeling bad' out of the equation altogether, they're doing their kids a disservice.
Brett, I'm completely with you on this. By 5th grade, kids should begin to have a sense of whether or not they're contributing. If they're not, they should be told, or get some clear feedback. Right and wrong, good and bad, winning and losing, have been cleared away to make kids feel more comfortable, but they've also eroded any notion of meaningful sense. This is what the universalists did when they took away hell. Now no one will suffer eternal damnation, but there is also no point to our actions.
It's also what happens when everyone gets a bailout from the government.
Beetles still have to figure out what's good and bad.
As do gophers.
Our whole species will suffer unless we continually try to make these distinctions.
Winning is good.
Losing is bad.
Playing but losing is better than not participating.
I hope all the kids will be back in spring plus another fifty.
Playing but losing is better than not participating.
It depends upon the game.
I can remember being a six-year old sweltering in a polyester uniform in the middle of the Florida summer wondering when each T-Ball game would end only to have our one team win happen the week I wasn't there. All I really remember from the games were cranky coaches who assumed I knew how to play (I had never watched a game of baseball in my life) and kids who laughed at me.
So, as Brett said, I re-evaluated things and stuck to reading and playing with my friends over the summer.
GM, this is one of the great inequalities that I was forced to contemplate during the season. My dad was a sports professor and from the time I was alert he would throw a ball with me, practice batting, throws, he made the backyard into a soccer field, and taught us to swim, and do gymnastics. I am probably bookish by nature but because of my dad I was also picked first or second on most teams. I was never a dweeb, and am still not a dweeb.
And I have made certain that my kids can play all the sports necessary to building male success.
It's critical. But not every kid has a dad and some have dads who are clueless.
Especially about soccer (maybe they played football, which is a different sport with a different skill set).
So it was part of my job to realize this and to try to get kids whose parents were not necessarily soccer geniuses, and to pull them in and give them enough capital that they could contribute to the team. I taught them how to kick effectively, how to fake someone out, and how to pass, and what to think about when they didn't have the ball (playing "off the ball" is not apparent to non-soccer players but is THE MOST important part of the game).
I'm sorry you had a bad experience and I'm sorry you didn't get fun from sports. Many of my greatest experiences are in sports. There's nothing else like winning a badminton game, or making a perfect dink.
In soccer nothing is so pleasurable as faking out the last defender and ripping a ground-level line drive into the very furthest corner.
This should be a human right, just as reading a ripping poem should be a human right.
I played a lot of no pads football with my friends. If we had had a rugby league I might have had more success. Keep teaching kids, kirby.
Structured sports are good, but in addition kids need to be allowed to play on their own without direct adult supervision.
Kids need to figure out how to make their own rules and how to navigate social situations and competitive situations.
They need to be able to play in unstructured ways that require their imagination.
Too many kids are either playing structured sports, or not playing at all.
Send 'em into the woods, leave 'em alone in the backyard with a football, and they will learn -
This is why when schools take away recess it's f'in stupid - kids, (perhaps especially boys, in a physical sense) are programmed to play and rough-house and whatnot because it's how people learn to negotiate the world and think creatively.
That's why there are two things that may eventually lead to the destruction of America - a school system that 'teaches to the test,' thus creating humans who don't know how to learn and don't know how to create and don't know how to interact with others and problem solve... And helicopter parents who deprive their kids of most of the prerequisite experiences of actually growing up -
While Americans have progressively been getting 'softer' for decades, this sort of fear-based parenting escalated on 9/11, and may well be the most lasting, devastating effect bin Laden had on our country.
Summer camp, organized competitive sports, and recess are the institutions that help combat this - It might be impossible to get parents back to the place where they say 'get the hell out of the house and don't come back until the streetlights come on' (or 'go off into the woods, but make sure you can still see the house, and come back when I whistle, as it was in my childhood)...
Found this group playing on the porch of the Montessori where my sister teaches music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhLq941ZZl0&feature=player_detailpage
It's a local band.
Brett, I like your sanguine approach. Today in the day of NAMBLA, I wonder if parents don't have reason to helicopter.
But maybe that was always around and is today merely more publicized. Human nature couldn't just change, could it?
My kids are always wrestling and playing sports with each other and with the neighborhood. Someone's feelings are always hurt, and the bus ride home sounds like nightmare on Elm St (the bus goes up Elm St.). Teenagers screaming gay gay gay at small children for having long hair, and everybody pounding on each other verbally after a day of relative restraint while being observed at school.
It's Lord of the Flies. But I guess it's ok for kids to stare into the abyss of their own nature for a half hour every day.
"But maybe that was always around and is today merely more publicized. Human nature couldn't just change, could it?"
Bingo. NAMBLA'S been around since '77. Pedophiles and murderers have been around forever.
Bullying is bad, but it has been around forever - kids these days are so generally over-protected that when they run into the extreme versions of older-aged bullying, they don't have coping mechanisms and all hell breaks loose.
The only real problem with hectic school busses is if the drivers get distracted and accidents happen.
But kids berating kids, and learning how to handle it (and learning how to avoid it, says the guy who sat in the middle of the bus and leaned his head against the window and stared out at the world swimming by), is a regular part of growing up.
When kids Don't experience this for most of their upbringing, and then get exposed to it for the first time in its more vicious forms during their hormonal teenage years, well then they don't know how to cope and bad things happen.
It's always sounded like your kids have a relatively well-balanced upbringing, Kirby - This probably is influenced not only by you, but also by where you live and (perhaps) with the fact that your wife is from Finland.
Kirby, count me as a new fan. I linked to you from Althouse a few weeks ago, and had fun -- er, was morally and intellectually enriched -- browsing through your archives. (And a hat tip to your wife for her immaculate house. I have two young kids myself and am duly impressed.)
In this post, I like your point that a sense of "passivity and numbness toward consequences" can be transferred from basically nihilistic parents to their kids in the course of day-to-day life, without any conscious intent to paint the world for them in dreary shades of gray. I know something about this from my own childhood, but am trying to do the opposite with my kids by imparting a sense of the joy and wonder of life, the exhiliration of caring about things, and the courage to try hard and risk losing, because it sure beats not giving a damn.
And please keep ranting about Buddhism, because it's hilarious to keep kicking this -- mixed religious metaphor alert -- sacred cow. I look forward to visiting this site often.
Maya, I hope you continue on with us. This was a very bright spot in my day that you liked the blog, and that you hate Buddhism, too. It's the worst of all the religions. They haven't even got a deity! What on earth? And their Buddha is a fatso! It says quite clearly in Psychology Today this month that anyone who's fat is a bad person. So this means they are following a bad person! Bad because lazy!
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