Winning or Improving?

I agree with it and here's why. I have coached several games where my squad where severely outmatched (numbers, talent, etc....) and we played very, very well and lost.

For example, at the middle school I coached at, we split between two evenly matched teams, meaning we generally never get more than 20 kids per squad. There is a school on our league that refuses to do the same and they generally field a team of over 40 kids. The don't platoon, or anything like that, their best kids are on the field at all times. I played them one year with 13 kids on my team (had a few kids injured) and they had 42, and hadn't lost a game all year .We played our best game of the year and lost to them 21-20.

Yeah, it sucked to lose, but the kids played a hard nosed game of football and we improved leaps and bounds. I have also coached several games where we won, but played very poorly. Had I based my evaluation for that week on the W, I wouldn't have poured over the game film for five hours that night and I probably wouldn't have fixed the problems the next week.

Base your evaluation on the things that YOU can control such as your team's level of conditioning, preparedness, etc. One thing none of us can control is our opponent's size, speed, strength, and skill, not to mention decisions by the officials that go against you.

Of course we all want to win on the scoreboard. However there will be times when that just isn't going to happen because the factors that you have no control over make it impossible.

We have 5 "goals" that we drill into our kids and not one of them mentions winning (the scoreboard kind). They are:

Do Your Job, Be Physical, Give 100%, Eliminate Mistakes, and Run-Block-Tackle. I didn't invent this list - I've seen it in many other programs, including Bob Stoops at Oklahoma, but the neat thing about it is that not one of the goals involves any degree of talent and yet is totally controlled by our players. We also stress that IF we do follow these 5 rules, we end up putting our team "In a position to Win!"

The great John Wooden also stressed playing well over winning. Work hard, coach em' up, do the right thing, and the "wins" will take care of themselves.

Well put fbdoc, I like John Wooden's approach to sports psych. One thing to remember also- if you can control the goals- so can your kids. This will take a lot of pressure off of them because what you're asking of them is something they can do on an individual basis. If you stress winning above effort or even along with it, then going out and busting their butts is going to worthless without a win- which is the wrong thing to emphasize.

I'll give you another story- three years ago, my 8th grade team went out and played a sh*t game, with sh*t effort against a sh*t opponent. We won the game by a decent margin, but we were terrible out there, period. It wasn't just about ability, it was all effort, they were just flat out being lazy. I didn't have a single good thing to say to the kids after the game- I told them that even though we won, they should be disappointed and ashamed in the effort that they put out. Laying into them like that after a win got more motivation out of them than any pep speech I have ever given. They busted their butts for the rest of the season, played like a different team. They realized that win or lose, they had better be working hard was what I wanted to see out of them.

take care of yourself, focus on what the team needs to do to improve and continue to move forward as a team. If you can do this winning will happen. It may not be on a yearly basis due to the other teams dudes are a little bit bigger or better, but in the long run you will have a winning program.