Student Athletes: Self-Reflection

I have a profound respect for student athletes.  Not just because I was one in my youth, but because they demonstrate, on a regular basis, qualities that I feel that all people should have.

For example, in order to succeed as an athlete, you have to roll with the punches.  You have to be willing to stumble and fall to perfect yourself in your craft.  It's this level of determination and perseverance that people who don't take sports seriously will never understand (or would never go through themselves).  This level of focus requires lots of discipline and this is not something that is easily taught to youngsters.  When athletes look at their shortcomings and work to improve themselves in their weakest areas, they demonstrate all of the aforementioned attributes, namely resilience, character, and discipline.

Some of the most dangerously motivated people I've come across are athletes coming off a loss.  You won't find a more determined group of people than a team that lost a competitive game they should have won.  There's no athlete in the world that will admit that they love to lose competitive matches.  If you don't believe me, try talking to an athlete after they've just lost a game, good luck giving them positive feedback...  You're better off keeping your mouth shut, trust me.  For athletes, it's losing games that make you a reflective practitioner of what you do.

Imagine going to a training session where you are continuously judged/evaluated, corrected in front of others, and occasionally embarrassed/punished/chastised for something you're not born to do well.  Most people would throw their hands in the air and give up.  But athletes are not most people.  In the realm of a classroom, this behavior amounts to mental or psychological torture or bullying, but in practice on a pitch, it's a form of character development.  Athletes grow thick skin for verbal abuse (by classroom standards) after a while (they also loosen their tongues - which can be good or bad).  This can be a grey area in coaching youngsters, but it tends to focus on a coach's ability to provide meaningful and effective feedback without deteriorating a player's self-confidence.

My closest friends in life all stemmed from school sports.  They may not have been my inner circle at the time, since school sort of socially categorizes kids in strange ways, but the friends that have persisted and stuck with me in life have all come from my youth soccer team.  As I coach the U-18 girls team here, I start to think back to when I was still a lad, specifically about playing the game and the dynamics of the team.  These girls don't realize it yet, but even if they're not in the same social circles now, they'll turn to each other later in life with the same level of intensity and passion that they show on the pitch.  Who am I kidding, every time I join a local intramural or traveling team, I end up socializing with the other players.

Team sports teaches players to make irrational sacrifices.  There are universal instances where players will play through injury or pain to give their team that extra edge.  Every athlete has done it before, just ask (each one has their own stories to tell about this).  As a coach, this can be a dangerous and nerve-racking character attribute.  No benevolent coach encourages players to risk serious injury.  But recognizing signs of serious injury can be masked by the endorphin-saturated, fight-or-flight atmosphere of a competitive match.

As a player, you oftentimes find yourself sizing up your opposite number.  Now that I coach, I do it all the time to evaluate weaknesses in opposition...  But this behavior has diffused to players and now they do it also.  It's a normal behavior to scrutinize your competition to see what you're up against or to see what you can do to embarrass them and send them home in tears (some athletes think this way, I don't fault them for it).  In sports, it's kill or be killed.  If you're not owning your competition, then you're the one being owned.  Identifying players with this mentality weeds out the players who are only in it for fun (win or lose - so not a committed, competitive athlete) and the others who have fun dominating their opponents (who can be occasionally excessive)...

In this light, it is also notable that athletes recognize other athletes.  Players always look for ways to improve their group with new players.  It's a strange and contradictory dynamic.  If they're your opposition, you hate their guts, but if they plan to join your team, you embrace their abilities with high fives and thumbs up!