A Losing Record?

Four years ago, I was asked to coach a start up football team at a large Baptist church in our area. Although I played football through high school, I’d never coached before. It had been years since I’d studied plays or practiced the fundamentals. Nevertheless, I agreed to help coach this new team of 10, 11, and 12 year olds.

We had a lot of things working against us that season. To start, I was a rookie head coach. While most teams in our league had 24 or more players, we had 14, most of which had never played football before. And except for a few, most of the boys on the team were tiny.

I’d like to tell you that we had a made-for-a-Christmas-movie kind of season where we make the playoffs, and win the state title with a miracle field goal in the final second of the game! Unfortunately, the opposite was true. Our team was 0 and 8. There were many games that we never scored a touchdown. For a guy who’s very competitive, who played on teams that won city championships, and whose high school team advanced deep into the state playoffs, this was hard pill to swallow.

Over the course of the season, even though I kept on a good face and spoke words of encouragement to each kid individually, inside I felt like those months spent with that team was a failing effort and wasted time.

Then one day about a year ago, I was eating lunch with a friend in downtown Charlotte. We were sitting out at a table on the sidewalk. A man vaguely familiar came up to me and introduced himself.

“You might not remember me,” he said, “but you coached my son several years ago in football.” I assured him that I did remember both him and his son, a boy who at ten years old had been the quarterback of our team. The man went on, “I just wanted you to know that my son had such a great year that year. He had never really been interested in sports up until then, but after that season with you, he developed a real love for the game of football. He kept playing and all these years later he is a starting outside linebacker on his high school football team. I wanted you to know what an impact you had on him.”

He walked away and I realized that it’s wasn’t the record that mattered that year. A life was changed in the middle of a losing season.

As parents, we also get caught up in the day to day struggles we have with our kids. A lot of days it seems like we’re going 0-8, we struggle to fight our discouragement, and feel like our efforts are failing. But take heart. Our kids are watching and learning and will model what they see.

It’s not your record that matters, but the kind of coach you are for your team.