The agony of defeat - what are we teaching our kids?

When are winners actually losers? No, not when somebody wins a "Have Dinner With Nicholas Cage" contest. It's when you play soccer in Ottawa. At least some of the time.

Yes, according to the CBC (and probably many other outlets, but that's the article I'm using), an Ottawa youth soccer league has decided that if a team wins by more than 5 goals, they are declared the losers.

Is this evidence of the "self esteem" movement run amok? Is it a bad thing for a child to experience losing, even badly, and to discover that sometimes life just happens to suck and you come out on the wrong end of the stick? Why are people so eager to coddle losers at the expense of the winners?

We're already dumbing down achievement by giving awards to everybody who plays the game anyway, so I guess this is the next step. Instead of saying "everybody's a winner!" we're now saying "if you win too easily, you're a loser!" Is that a good message to send to our kids? Is that getting them ready for the real world? Will they expect that when some cutthroat businessman squeezes them out of a deal by deploying his ruthless business instincts, that they're actually going to get the deal themselves because the other guy beat them too badly?

Sadly, it might be coming down to that.

According to Kevin Cappon, a 17-year-old player who scored the 6-1 goal to put his team ahead by that magical 5-goal margin:

"I couldn't really believe it, but I wasn't going to doubt the referee," he told CBC's Ottawa Morning Monday.

His team spent the next 20 minutes just passing the ball and keeping it from their opponents, he recalled.

"I felt like I was mocking them sort of when I really didn't want to … I didn't feel good doing it, and I don't think they felt good receiving it."

That's right. They toyed with the other team because they couldn't afford to score that 7th goal. That had to make the other team feel good.

But I loved this part:

"Cale said the rule has been on the books for years to encourage coaches to start thinking about strategies to even out the game when the score reaches a three or four goal spread.

For example, the league recommends that players on the winning team can:

Play short-handed.
Kick with their weaker foot.
Play positions that they have less experience playing."

This is ridiculous! So a team is up by 5 goals. They start kicking with their left feet (or right feet, if they usually use their left). Two results can happen:

1) They still kick the shit out of the other team by 5 goals, thus showing the other team that they can be beaten handily even by players intentionally playing badly. Wow that team must *really* suck.

2) The other team scores a goal or two, and the first team turns on the jets again until they have that 5-goal lead back. Then they go back to intentionally sucking.

What lesson does this teach our kids?

When I was in Little League baseball, there was a 10-run rule. When a team went up by 10 runs, the game was called. I think it had to be after a certain number of innings, but I can't remember. That's not a bad thing, because it ends the slaughter, but the team that was winning ACTUALLY WINS. That's a very notable and important difference.

This Ottawa thing? It's bullshit, pure and simple.

Kids have to learn how to lose. They have to learn how to lose badly. If we shelter our kids from this vital lesson, they're going to get a rude awakening when they finally reach the real world.

You know the old saying: "It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game." To me, that just means that as long as you play hard, you can take pride in the fact that you did your best.

You still lost, though. Don't forget that. Learn from it. And try to win next time.

(h/t: Tuesday night's Red Eye episode, where they talked about this story)