[mathking]

Originally Posted by jlindquist74

There's been a lot of talk in this thread about the importance of winning, or a desired lack thereof. If you want to de-emphasize it, it has to stop meaning anything. You can't do it in small measures. Stop keeping records, eliminate elimination brackets, and drop all invitations to CMP based on winning matches.

Does anyone else remember Ben Kingsley's line in Searching For Bobby Fischer? "To put a child in a position to care about winning and not to prepare him is wrong."

When you tell any of your kids that winning isn't important, or isn't that important, the flapping sound you hear is your credibility flying away. You say that, and they know you're full of it. They didn't spend six weeks of their lives building a robot to look good, run well, and play nice with others. They built it to win. (By, amongst other things, looking good, running well, and playing nice with others.) Don't pretend they didn't, if you want them to absorb anything else you say.

Saying that winning is not the goal is not the same things as saying winning doesn't matter. De-emphasizing winning is an expression you used, but saying to de-emphasize winning you have to make in mean nothing is a false dichotomy. The original post of this thread started a discussion about whether people had buyer's remorse for this season. Meaning are you unhappy that you decided to participate? I suspect that there are a great many students unhappy with how the season ended up for there team who are nonetheless very happy they participated.

If we define our goal as winning, then almost every team at every competition is going to fail. When I say winning is not the goal of FIRST I mean just that. The goal is changing the culture. That is a goal at which a lot more teams can succeed. Winning is certainly something to strive for. I would even argue that if you are not trying to win the game on the field then you are going to have a harder time inspiring students. But they way you say "They didn't spend six weeks of their lives building a robot to look good, run well, and play nice with others. They built it to win." brings that dichotomy back.

A decade and a half of FIRST experience, two and a half decades as a coach and my own experience in athletics tells me there are going to be kids on just about every team that are participating for other reasons than winning. Sometimes that is very hard for me as a coach. I am by nature very competitive, but I have to remember that I am there for the kids. They are not there for me to live vicariously through them. We had about 170 kids on our cross country team this past season. Only one of them ever won race, and he only won one race. Our girls team did not win a single meet. But our season was certainly not a failure and the kids did not feel that the season was a failure. I know some coaches who would (and do) consider such seasons as failures. And they are the ones who feel unhappy most of the time. Always chasing the once a while season when you win a lot.

Yes, if you are not sincere, your students are going to read it in an instant. So you need to be sincere. I have missed a top 8 position at the Championships by a half an inch. I have been on what should have been the winning alliance at Buckeye and had our robot KOd by the faulty CAN connections of the Jaguars. I have missed qualifying for the state cross country meet by a single place of a single runner. I have had a dead spot in an arena floor turn running out the final few seconds of a basketball title into a game winning layup by the other team. I have had an athlete run her personal best time at the state meet, lead her team to its best finish in a decade but miss making the top 15 podium by one spot. Its not that those things don't hurt. They do. But part of my job as a coach is to make kids realize not winning is not the same thing as failing.

The point is that if you let these negatives define the experience the kids will also define the experience this way. Sometimes you do your absolute best and you don't win. If winning is the goal then you have failed in the endeavor. If winning is something you strive for in order to achieve the goal of inspiring kids to change the world, then you can succeed even when you don't win.