Winning Without Winning …with Gerry Crowley

Children love to participate in games. It can be a ball game or a checker game. It can be the choir or dancing. It can be as a participant or a spectator and it can be a boy or a girl. Age makes no difference and their reason is always the same---"because it's fun."

We have all witnessed kids playing road hockey, basketball, singing or maybe just playing with marbles and we have all seen these activities without adults involved. Adults can make it better for them. Add organization, make up some rules, bring in a referee, divide them up into teams and right away things are better. It should work but all too often, there is a problem. Ejection from games, forfeits, verbal abuse and in severe situations, physical confrontations. When the kids are playing amongst themselves there is seldom a problem yet when adults get involved there are problems. This problem exists today in every sport, every age group, boys or girls teams. Having heard a thousand stories one thing has become very clear---the problem is always the same.

So what is 'Winning Without Winning?' This is a book that deals with this problem head on and with gentle philosophy, creates an awareness that has caused many coaches to change the way they coach.

Recently, after a 45-minute speech in Mississauga Ontario a woman asked me to help her with a problem she had with a coach in her son's life. Due to a birth defect, the eleven-year-old boy wore a prosthetic leg. This did not stop the young boy from participating in a sport he loved---a hockey goalie. The boy's mother, in tears continued, "his coach took him aside at the beginning of the year and told my son that because of his leg he would hurt the teams' chances of winning and could not play on his team." Fortunately, the boy's coach from years past took the youngster on his team. She asked me, "How can we deal with that?"

Yes was her reply when I asked if her son was having fun. I suggested she push her son to achieve all his goals and desires. I continued, "He has a rougher road than most and handles his handicap well. He has already risen above the level of that dangerous coach so continue to encourage him to aim high with his dreams. As proud of your son as you are, the best is yet to come."

What could that coach have possibly been thinking? Its all part of the same problem and I hope to change the way many coaches think so that children are not exposed to such diatribe. This is my first column for Sports Xpress and through this column and the book, "Winning Without Winning" I will never stop my efforts to rid the minor sports scene of coaches such as the one just described.

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