A mother with a cricket-mad son recently asked me for help. Her boy had been selected to play for the year above. It was a gigantic moment. Not only was he going to be playing with the older boys at his school, but it was also his first ever hard-ball cricket match. For the week building up to the big day, he was a bundle of excitement and nerves (but mostly excitement). This was his World Cup final. The greatest day of his young career to date. Game day rolled around. His team batted first and he never got a chance to bat. He loves his batting so that was a bitter pill to swallow but he kept his head up. In the field, the match got tight. His team bowled all their best bowlers first to try and kill off the game. However, the opposition just about survived this barrage. So it was left for the part-time bowlers to try and win the game. Fielding far from the inner-ring, the boy was suddenly called to bowl the final two overs of the match. It was his first real taste of the action of the entire day. The occasion was too much. With the pressure of the fixture hanging in the balance, the hopes of the older boys resting on his shoulders, and no experience in hard-ball cricket matches whatsoever, he bowled two overs that were well below the standard he is capable of and his team lost the game. He was inconsolable. His World Cup final had ended in disaster. In the car on the way home, he cried and cried. And his mother did her best to hide her tears, but she cried too because she knew his pain but could do nothing to take it away.
I wasn’t there in person that day. But I also was. Growing up, obsessed with sports, I went through these moments many times. And in my coaching and mentoring career, I have seen these scenarios play out time and time again.
And so the mother asked me a question that I am frequently posed by many others parents: What can she do to help her son deal with these disappointments?
I have a bunch of tools that I teach parents and their children that help young athletes work through these difficult times. I consider this to be extremely important work. Most notably because disappointment in sport is inevitable. And if young athletes don’t develop ways to deal with these disappointments, this can detract significantly from the experience of playing sport, and can ultimately lead to these young athletes stopping playing sport all together. I believe that sport is the greatest of playgrounds to learn life in. And so young people leaving this playground is a terrible outcome in my opinion.
It’s important to note here, that these tools are not to prevent disappointments from happening. Rather they are to help young athletes deal with disappointments when they do happen. So here are five of them.
The Feeling Tool
Young athletes need to be given space and time to face and feel their disappointments. It’s okay to be disappointed. Suppressing these negative emotions just means they’ll come out at a later stage (in class, at home, with friends, etc.). Here, a 15-minute walk around the field, a few moments in a change-room, or a conversation with a listening parent goes along way to helping children acknowledge and turn towards what they are experiencing. It’s useful to have a predetermined amount of time for the child to sit with what they are feeling. This gives the feeling stage of disappointment a clear start-point and end-point. Feeling the disappointment is a vital part to moving past it. And when we face disappointment head-on, its often not as scary and unbearable as we imagine it to be.
The Accepting Tool
New to competitive sport, young athletes often struggle to accept that losing and failure are part and parcel of sport. At the start of a competitive sporting career, these concepts are largely foreign to children because they haven’t experienced them very much. And because of the unpleasant emotions associated with losing and failure, it’s easy for young children to think there is something wrong with losing and failure. The Accepting Tool reminds children that it’s okay to lose and its okay to fail. Here, I like to make children aware of how often professional athletes fail. For instance, in cricket, a highly successful batter will, on average, only get a score of 50 + once every three or four innings. That means they’ll be failing between 66% and 75% of the time! If young athletes realise that their idols fail, its easier for them to accept they are allowed to fail too.
The Satisfaction Tool
If we always won or always did well in sport, it wouldn’t be much fun. We’d very quickly get bored because we would always know how the game was going to finish. That’s one of the reasons children get bored of PlayStation or Xbox games. They master the game, know they are going to win every time, and so eventually look for another challenge (usually in the form of a new PlayStation or Xbox game). Part of the beauty of sport though is the unknown that characterises it. Our successes and victories are exhilarating and satisfying because we know the pain and frustration of defeat and failure. This must be explained to young children. This conceptualisation of defeat and failure provides disappointment with meaning and context. And helps children to not just understand feelings of disappointment but to appreciate them too. It also educates children about the zero-sum nature of sport and the fact that for someone to win, someone else needs to lose.
The Growth Tool
One of the primary reasons for playing competitive sport at a young age should be to learn and improve. We can learn and improve by winning and succeeding. But we can also learn and improve by losing and failing. Seeing moments of adversity as opportunities to become superior athletes and people is at the heart of a Growth Mindset. Instilling a Growth Mindset in young athletes helps them to see value in disappointment. The Growth Tool is about guiding young athletes to reflect on disappointments and to extract learnings form them. Not only will this make them better at what they do. But it will also shift the focus away from the disappointment itself, and towards a much more optimistic ideal – the opportunity to progress.
The Gratefulness Tool
When experiencing disappointment in sport, young children can lose perspective. They typically believe the match they have just lost is the biggest match in the world. In that moment, they see nothing else. Gratuity lists are great ways to regain perspective. They needn’t be lengthy. But verbalising or writing down three or four good things that the child is grateful for is an effective way to remind the child of the many beautiful things that they have going for them. The Gratefulness Tool doesn’t neglect the disappointment and pretend it never happened, it just reduces it to its appropriate size and helps children to see the bigger picture (or the full picture, whichever you prefer).
Conclusion
The above tools should be used consistently – whether your child wins or loses, succeeds or fails. Using these tools as post-game rituals after EVERY match makes them easier to implement when they are needed most – to deal with disappointment. However, it also ensures that young athletes conceptualise matches as more than merely opportunities to win or lose, and rather as opportunities to grow and learn, as both people and athletes.
A word of warning (and a shameless sales pitch). But your child might struggle to learn the above tools from the same voice that tells them to eat their vegetables, do their homework, stop playing Xbox, and go to bed at 20:00. If you think this might be the case (or if this is the case), then don’t hesitate to get in touch with me to talk you and your child through these tools (and a few others) so you can both learn to navigate the disappointments of sport better.
