Sportsmanship

In this era of extreme competitiveness, it's nice to reflect on the true meaning of sportsmanship. Winning is nice, but it shouldn't be the driving force as to why we compete. We compete to improve ourselves, mark our progress, and for the sheer enjoyment of the sport. Winning should not be how we gauge our success. If we have put forth our best effort, learned from our mistakes, but most importantly, enjoyed ourselves, then we have succeeded and we are all winners.

As we prepare for another season, let's remember why we are all here. We are here for the kids. Let us remember the true meaning of sportsmanship during the season. It is more than a simple number that the referee marks down on the back of a lineup card at the end of the game. Let's encourage all the kids and provide positive support to all those that play the game. We need to remember that the coach,players, and parents on the opposite side of the field are not your nemesis. By offering encouragement, praise, and support to both teams, we will succeed in setting a great example of sportsmanship for our children to pass on. Remember it's only a game and we all need to help ensure that ALL the kids enjoy themselves and learn to love this great sport of soccer.

Region 15 would like to recognize those players, coaches, or fans that exhibit great sportsmanship during the season. If you see any great examples of sportsmanship, and would like to have that person acknowledged, let us know and we'll share your message with others.

In the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, six-time medalist Eugenio Monti from Italy was favored to win the gold medal in the bobsledding pair event. After his team’s last run, it looked like they were going to make it.

The British team, led by Tony Nash Jr., still had a chance, but before their final run, Nash discovered a critical axle bolt had broken on their sled. They were done. Without hesitation, Monti removed the bolt from his sled and rushed it up to Nash’s team. They were able to continue, and their run was so strong they won the gold medal.

The Italian press viciously criticized Monti for giving up the gold, but he was steadfast. "Nash didn’t win because I gave him the bolt," he said. "He won because he had the fastest run."

Olympic swimming medalist John Naber says a true sportsman, one who believes in the Olympic ideal, not only wants to win, he wants to win against his best opponent on his best day. A true sportsman is not elated, but disappointed, when top competitors are injured or disqualified.

Monti won the gold medal at the next Winter Olympics, but it was his willingness to lose that earned him a prominent place in Olympic history. His act represents sportsmanship at its best: the pursuit of victory with zeal and passion, recognizing that there’s no true victory without honor.

Today, with so many teams and athletes willing to cheat or behave badly to win, we need reminders of the noble potential of sports. Parents and coaches should teach youngsters that the real glory of sport is in the striving, not the winning.

Flashback: It is August of 1968. Middlebury College’s soccer team, one of the first American teams to play in Europe — and the first ever to play behind the Iron Curtain — has a match in Helsinki, Finland, against a first or second division (semi-pro) club team. On the first play of the game, Middlebury’s keeper dives for a save and breaks his collarbone. Since the reserve keeper is playing in another match on the other side of Helsinki, a field player is drafted to play in the goal.

Despite heroic efforts by this converted forward, the score is 10-0 early in the second half. Coach Joe Morrone, who would go on to become one of college soccer’s winningest coaches at the University of Connecticut, abandons the idea of breaking his clipboard and turns his attention to supporting the battered psyches of his players. The Middlebury team rallies, thanks to a Finnish mistake, and scores a late goal, but winds up losing 12-1.

What a young fullback on the overmatched Middlebury team remembers most about the match is a sequence of short passes late in the game in which the Finns worked the ball right into the American team’s goal mouth. Instead of tapping in a 12-inch shot, the Finnish striker simply left the ball on the goal line. He trapped the ball with the sole of his shoe and then nonchalantly jogged back toward midfield. There was no taunting, no appeal to the spectators for special recognition. He just left it there.

After the match, the Middlebury squad joined the Finnish team at its training facility for a genuine sauna, a sumptuous meal and some international socializing. For the American players, Helsinki was one of the highlights of the trip, despite losing by a very lopsided score. The act of leaving the ball on the line seems, in retrospect, an extraordinarily powerful yet subtle statement about the team’s mastery of the sport and about the players’ humanity.

The match described above was, by any definition, a blowout. The magnitude of the score differential is ample evidence that one team demonstrated its superiority over the other. Similarly one-sided scorelines are found in the results of youth league, high school and college games every week. Unfortunately for many teams, the soccer runaway experience is frequently more stressful than it was for the Middlebury team 28 years ago.

Anyone who has played soccer for any length of time has undoubtedly been on both sides of this scoreline. It’s not much fun to lose under any circumstances, but it’s especially difficult when an opponent runs up the score. Players are brought face-to-face with their shortcomings, and their confidence erodes. Even the winning team tends to suffer a bit in a lopsided game. Some players feel badly for friends on the losing team. Others may feel shortchanged because they received less playing time when the coach cleared the bench, or because they didn’t get a chance to play as competitively as they would have liked.

Attending to players’ bruised feelings and self-esteem is a difficult but important job for losing coaches in blowout games. They have to put aside their own feelings of frustration and find positive outcomes from an unpleasant experience. In soccer, as in any learning situation, success is a vital element in improvement. Yet it’s a real struggle to find ways to have players perceive anything about a one-sided loss in positive terms.

What can players, coaches and organizers do to avoid blowouts? And if one-sided contests can’t be completely eliminated, how can we minimize their negative effects? Our purpose in writing this piece is not to deliver the definitive answer for handling blowout situations, but to sample opinion, invite reflection, stimulate discussion and perhaps generate some constructive strategies for handling games involving mismatched teams. To that end, some thoughts from a coach and two players:

Most winning coaches dislike blowouts, too, although there are some who seem to revel in running up the score on an overmatched team. Many strong teams get into bad playing habits when they face an inferior opponent, and sometimes these patterns may come back to haunt the team when it faces a more evenly matched side. Coaches on the winning side have to confront attitudinal issues as well. Just as losing teams suffer from eroded confidence and low selfesteem, a winning team may find arrogance, laziness or poor sportsmanship among its players.

Frequently coaches of stronger teams will impose restrictions on their own players in an effort to hold down the score. Although this strategy may succeed in restricting scoring, the psychological effect may be every bit as insulting to the weaker team if the coach and players flout their restrictions in a condescending way. (For some creative approaches to player restrictions, see sidebar.)

League or tournament rules sometimes have the effect of compounding the blowout situation. If teams are rewarded with higher seedings or tie-breaker advantages for goals scored or goal differential, there is a disincentive to keep the score from becoming one-sided. As a result, some organizers have opted for “fewest goals allowed” as the primary criterion for seeding, rather than “most goals scored.”

Ironically, many players and coaches who would describe themselves as “competitive” would really rather win than compete. Coaches need to remind themselves and their players that true competition necessarily involves evenly matched opponents in contests where real uncertainty exists about who will prevail. If we find ourselves enjoying the easy wins more than the hotly contested, hard-fought losses then we may be fairly typical, but we’re probably not “competitive.” Too many blowout wins — especially if they are excessively glorified by coaches, parents and fans — may dilute an athlete’s taste for the legitimate struggle of real competition.

A junior soccer team in Bucharest, Romania, abandoned the field with two minutes remaining in a game because fans threatened to strip the players naked if they gave up two more goals. With the score already 16-0, the team apparently took the fans at their word and fled to the locker room.

More than a quarter century has elapsed between the Middlebury College loss in Helsinki and the recent incident in Bucharest. Blowouts continue to occur. We are not likely to eradicate them entirely from soccer or any other sport. But there is at least one former player who finds considerably more dignity in the Finnish strategy of “leaving one on the line” than the Romanian “solution.”

“Shoot with the weaker foot” and other low-scoring ideas

What can the winning team do to keep the score down while still playing good soccer and benefiting from the experience? Here’s a list of possible conditions and restrictions that coaches and players can accept to help balance the competitive situation on the field and still play hard. The list is arranged in approximate order of difficulty:

Change positions, including keeper.

Shoot only with weaker foot.

Score only after successfully executing give-and-go in the offensive third of the field.

Make 10 consecutive passes before attacking the goal.

No one may score until a designated player scores.

Enforce two-touch passing limitation.

Allow two-touch passing in defensive end, one-touch in offensive end.

Score by heading only.

Following restarts (including throw-ins), all 11 players must touch the ball before attacking the goal.

And leave one on the line!