Everyone has some moment in their lives that they remember and hold in great importance, yet to other people these memories may not seem that important. I will never forget my minor league baseball team when I was 9 years old. When you are a kid sports tend to be far more important than most other things in life. I have always been a very competitive person and this was true this season. We entered the season with dreams of winning the regular season championship. We were all new to the league and we all felt like we had just as good of a shot as anyone of winning. Then the games started.
We got destroyed with great regularity. We realized that we just were not as good as we had hoped. We lost almost every single game and they were not even close. We were focused all season on winning and if we lost we thought we failed. As the end of the season tournament started to approach we realized that we only had a few games left and that we just wanted to have as much fun as possible. What followed was like a cheesy Hollywood movie. We ended up running the table and winning the double elimination tournament undefeated. It was not that we practiced more and got better but instead that we just wanted to have fun. And, as any baseball player can attest to, having the right mentality is vital to success. We played carefree, wanting to do our best, but if we did not we shrugged it off and kept on going. I cannot say that we stopped caring about winning but instead that it was no longer the most important aspect of the game. It has showed me that winning should not be the focus and making sports fun should be. Sport can be a beautiful thing as long as we do not ruin it with what we impose on it.
Thomas Kostielney, ND Class of 2012
Social Foundations of Coaching
