When Policy Meets Dumbassery: If You’re Too Good, You Automatically Lose!

A friend of mine posted a link to the article below on Facebook. It’s about a youth soccer league in Canada that instituted a new rule: If a team leads by goals, that team loses! Read it for yourself:

Win By Five, Lose The Game, Says Absurd Youth Soccer Rule

That’s right, if your team is winning by five goals, then your team loses.

One more time:
Your team.
Up by five.
You lose.

What.

The.

Heck?!?!

The article says (though not quoting anyone in particular), “It’s all about self-esteem, and fostering a “non-competitive” environment.”

Brilliant. Let’s start a league involving a competitive sport and then make it a non-competitive environment. Riiiiiiigggggghhhhhhhhtttttt…

I’m not a child therapist, or a parent, so maybe somebody else can clue me in on this. Maybe there is a ton of research that says that kids who are on badly losing teams grow up to do bad, bad things. If so, I would like to see this study.

Look, I get it: losing sucks. Getting blown out sucks worse. But is the answer to insulate kids from all potentially bad situations?

I don’t think so.

The article says the league has over 3,000 kids from ages 4-18. I can see setting up a rule like that for the really young ones, just to make sure it stays fun (or better yet, not keeping with score). I can also see having penalties and consequences for taunting or gloating (unsportsmanlike conduct or something of the sort). Or doing the whole “mercy killing” thing and calling the game when one team gets too far ahead. Or even breaking up overly dominant teams to create parity. But to penalize the winning team for doing everything right is just stupid.

“Self-esteem”? I can tell you if I was on a team that was down 0-4 and I won because the other team scored yet another goal, I don’t think my self-esteem would suddenly skyrocket.

And what lessons is this rule teaching the kids in this league? I can think of a few:

1. If things get too bad, quit, because society will make it all ok for you.
2. Don’t be too good or achieve too much. Your success is unfair to the others.
3. Losing is awful, and you should avoid it at all costs. You should never be forced to face failure.

The last one is the most destructive. Yes, losing sucks and getting blown out sucks more. But guess what? That’s a part of life. There is no way to protect yourself or anyone else from failing, and occasionally failing big. Oh wait, there is one: don’t ever try to do anything!

One of the most useful lessons a person can learn, whether they are young or old, is how to face failure. Learning to continue to play hard and not give up when your team is getting blown out is a great lesson. So too is learning how to get blown out and not cry, whine, or start a fight. Most important is learning how to come back for the next game, even after you got blown out in the last one.

There is no parity in the world. If one person gets a job, that means a dozen other applicants get rejected. If I get a speaking gig, that means that a bunch of other speakers didn’t get it. Just about every happily married couple has left a few broken hearts in their wake. It sucks. It happens. It’s life.

The person who succeeds is not the one who insulates themselves from failure and loss. The person who succeeds is the one who learns that, “hey, I can face a loss but life goes on, I just need to pick myself back up and keep going.”

This seems to be yet another case of Policy Meets Dumbassery…

I suppose the idea is noble: let’s make it fun for the kids and help them build self-esteem. But the policy created to make that happen is ludicrous. Aren’t there many, many better ways of doing that than creating an absurdly stupid rule that hurts people who do well while never really benefits anyone else? My self-esteem is not going to soar watching the other team play “keep away” with the ball for 20 minutes once they are up by four points.

Here’s a crazy (and in my opinion better) idea I just thought of to achieve the goal in a less stupid way: If a team goes up by five points, end the game, make them the winner, and then spend the rest of the allotted game time with the winning kids leading a practice with the losing team. Winners get the win, the losing team gets instruction, the winners get their egos stroked by being able to teach, and everyone’s game gets upped. Would this work? Maybe, maybe not. Will it ever be implemented? Probably not. Do I think it’s better than the original idea? Oh yeah…

Here’s a simpler one I just thought of: Call the game for the leading team if they go up by five. Then scrimmage with the teams mixed up. The winners still get the win, but then the game continues with more evenly matched team. The kids get to meet and interact with new people, and everyone has more fun playing a competitive game.

Ugh, I could probably go on for thousands of words with ideas better than the original policy.

But since I am assuming you are not in a youth soccer league nor do you create the policies for one, there is no point in brainstorming up a big list of better solutions. Instead, I invite you to look at the policies (written or implied) in your own life (personal and professional). Are they grounded in intelligence that helps you achieve the goals you have for yourself and your business, or are they simply haphazard knee-jerk responses that do more harm than good? A little thought goes a long way…

As I said, I am not a therapist or parent. I’m not going to tell you how to raise your children, how to run your youth soccer league, or even how to be Canadian (I’m sure the US won’t be far behind…). But at the end of the day, success comes not from preventing all chance of failure or avoiding anything painful; it comes from learning how to face it, deal with, and keep going.

***
Are you planning an event and looking for a great speaker to add humor and energy? Then visit Avish’s Motivational Humorist page now!