7/8/14

Is it all about winning or losing? Is it about how you play the game? Or is it about the life lessons learned while playing team sports?

I played summer softball and was a clarinet player in the marching band growing up. At the time, I wasn’t paying much attention to what life lessons I might get out of being involved in activities where I had to be part of a team. Learning how to work and play well with others is a skill that we all must have to make life easier. None of us can do it alone, and if we don’t learn how to work as a team, it will be a much tougher journey.

We can teach kids a lot about life through sports. Sharing in their celebrations when the team does well and learning from the mistakes when the team loses, help them to not only become good baseball players, but also good people.

Lesson One: You don’t get to do what you want to do all of the time. Learning that one may have to do what the team wants them to do and not what one might want to do can be a difficult one to understand. Sometimes we don’t understand that the coach has a bigger goal in mind when they want us to do something we don’t want to do. Instead of seeing it as punishment to have to play it, how about looking at it as an opportunity to give you a break from that position, so another player can get some experience at the position you normally play? Playing right field when one really doesn’t want to be an example that has been brought up in our house. Right field is an important position on the field too, and someone needs to do it so that the team can play the game.

Adults can learn something from this too. In life, we don’t always get what we want when we want it either. And how many times at work have we procrastinated the task we don’t want to do, even though our team needs us to do it?