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How Losing All My Games Made Me a Better Leader
“Losing is only temporary and not all encompassing. You must simply study it, learn from it, and try hard not to lose the same way again. Then you must have the self-control to forget about it.” — John Wooden
It’s been a year since I stepped away from coaching middle school basketball. My last assignment was with a middle school girls team at a school where we had not won a game in more than six years.
Needless to say, there was a lot of emotion involved in my choice to leave coaching behind. I’ve felt a lot of emotions over time, most notably joy when we broke the drought and won 3 games last year and earned a playoff berth. As great as that season was, it wasn’t without its fair share of downs.
Even bigger than that though, the season prior set the stage for the come up. Out of sixteen games, we won a total of zero. Some of them were close, most of them were blowouts.
Far from being John Wooden, I was more like the angry parent blaming the players for letting my child down. I regressed a lot that season and became the worse version of myself in a lot of ways, but by the end of the following year looked back and…
