Matt Williams: Children need to be taught how to handle winning and losing

The process of educating children to participate in sports requires a far more nuanced approach than using the blunt instrument of banning competition.

Society needs to keep kids engaged with sports for all the mental and physical benefits that science has proven it provides, and no one wants to see a child’s confidence broken because of an experience in sport.

The Stoic philosopher Publilius Syrus tells us that “a river is easiest to cross at its source”. Sport is the best environment for our kids to learn about their competitive nature and that is best started when they are young. Banning competition simply kicks the problem further down the road.

Problems rarely start with the child but rather, in most cases, the source sits with either the parents or the coaches behind the child.

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Learning how to deal with not always winning is an essential skill of life, because that is a reality. And the overly competitive in our youth need to be mentored to learn how to control the powerful emotions that defeat creates inside them.

Much of the western world has forgotten that sport should be woven into our educational system as a tool to help children learn.

There is more to an education than achieving academic grades. Sadly, over the past two decades, much of our education system has drifted towards preparing our kids to be the meat in the economy’s grinder. School should be more than preparing kids to find a job. As a great educator and Marist Brother once advised me, “don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education”.

[ ‘We nearly lost our boy due to men who needed the under-12 win to make them feel they were great’ ]

Yet in striving for academic excellence our schools constantly compare and rank every student. Across the globe, exams at the end of high school, such as the Leaving Certificate, are an exercise in memory, not a measure of intelligence.

After the competition of high school exams, students must then compete for places at university before they enter into a highly competitive employment market in a society based on the competition created by a free-market economy.

In all of these battles for places, there are winners and losers. There are those who work with exceptional dedication that have the dream of becoming a doctor, but a single poor exam mark means they are not accepted into medicine. There are those who go through three interviews in the process of competing for a cherished job, but they are not the preferred candidate and miss out.

That is life.

Somehow, in all of this cut-throat competitiveness that powers our society, we are saying that kids’ sport has no role in teaching our youth how to learn about competition and how to handle defeat.

Helping our children to learn how to emotionally cope in competitive environments should be high on our educators’ priorities because that is the type of environment where almost all our children will spend their adult lives.

Being outrun by a faster competitor or standing behind the goalposts after the opposition have scored a try is unpleasant but it should not break a child’s confidence.

As the coaching mantra goes, “the game itself is the greatest of teachers”. Victory and defeat are realities of the game and both hold great lessons for us.

[ One in five secondary schools do not have a sports hall despite PE becoming exam subject ]

None of these situations are wrong for kids to experience if their parents, teachers and coaches guide them to learn the lessons that a defeat offers. Developing grit, hardiness, determination, perseverance and the healthy ability to laugh at yourself are essential qualities that nurture the resilience we all require to endure in our lives because life is not always equal.

Sometimes life throws your dreams under the bus and they get squashed. Sport should be a vehicle where our kids learn that at times across your life, even when you have given your all and produced your absolute best, you still can come up short and lose.

That happens. But sport teaches kids that we can live with that because as much as it is a cliche, if you gave your best, then that is all you could possibly have done.

The fact that it is a difficult process for children to navigate should not force those charged with their education to simply avoid the issue by banning competition.

Searching for that “Goldilocks” formula of what is the right amount of competition for our youth is problematic. Too much competitive pressure and some kids may walk away from the sport, while too little adrenaline pumping competitiveness and those born with a warrior instinct can lose interest and channel that energy towards harm.

[ GAA reiterate that games at under-12 and below should have no competitive element ]

We require a balance of allowing those born with competitive natures to learn how to control this highly emotional state. As a person who fits this description, I was fortunate to be surrounded by adults who educated, encouraged and guided me in learning how to channel my instinctive competitive emotion in a positive manner. At times they also had to disciple the negative actions that highly competitive kids display before they learn to fully control this powerful instinct

I have coached school-age rugby on and off for more than 40 years. While people will try to exploit the generational differences between Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen X, Y and Z, my experience – including working with talented and highly competitive teenagers this season – has always been that the similarities between the generations far outweigh the differences.

When kids fall in love with a sport, that shared love bridges the decades. This opens a window where the older generation can pass on hard-won learning from the errors they have made on their journeys and help guide the young guns who are charging enthusiastically into their future.

Mentoring them on how to master the spirit that fuels their internal drive of competitiveness and not kill it – that is the key.

Not an easy task. But like winning itself, if it was easy, then everyone would do it.