Roger Grossman on youth sports: Learning to win and lose
Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw
As we begin to transition from summer to back-to-school, I want to spend some time talking about an aspect of sports that no one talks about or teaches anymore.
Today, we’re going to discuss the concepts of winning and losing.
To be more specific, I’m not interested in explaining how you win and why you don’t. I want to help parents, coaches and players with how to handle success and how to deal with failing.
Unfortunately, we hear of more and more instances of family members, coaches and players behaving badly at sporting events.
And in 2026, we don’t just hear stories about these things, we can see them with our own eyes. We can do this because every game in every park and every gym is recorded by someone in attendance.
What happened, what was said, what the response was—all of it—is captured and posted on some social media site like YouTube for people like me to view and digest.
A big part of this is because we, collectively, have lost perspective on what these leagues are supposed to be about. And, as often is the case with the downfall of things, money is at the core of the problem.
Youth sports is big business, and those who profit from it are not interested in losing money. And families spend a lot of money to tap into what these teams promise, which is the road to scholarships and greatness.
Families spend thousands of dollars to put their kids on these teams, and they understandably look at it as an investment in their child’s future.
So when an umpire misses a call or when a referee has to make a block/charge call in a close game, the tension naturally rises.
When that moment seems to make a difference in the result of the game, people lose their cool.
And what used to be just yelling and screaming has gone much farther. It’s now getting physical.
Coaches are pushing umpires. Parents and grandparents run onto the basketball court and knock down officials who never see them coming.
Let’s remember the first and most important role of athletics in life and society—to teach us life lessons that will benefit us into adulthood.
At the head of the list of those lessons should be that the whole point of what they are doing is having fun while they are doing it.
The subpoints to that are learning the fundamentals of the sport and learning to be part of a team.
No matter what the skills you are trying to master, taking shortcuts never works.
And there aren’t too many people in life who will live out their days in complete solitude. Sports team show us how to build relationships. They teach us to sacrifice our own objectives for the good of the collective group. They put our lives into perspective.
Well…they are supposed to, anyway.
Too often, on too many levels, those noble goals of sports have been trampled on in the name of winning above all else.
“What’s the big deal?” you ask.
Well, because winning is not the only outcome possible in a sporting event, or in life.
We don’t teach kids how to lose with grace and class because we don’t want them to consider “losing” as an option.
Our collective ego is often disguised as a “quest for excellence”. People whose actions offend us will almost certainly defend themselves by saying “I’m just trying to make them into winners.”
Let me introduce an idea to you that I think is a better what to get kids to where you want to get them.
I think you will get a lot farther by teaching kids the fundamentals of the sport and then couple that with the joy of competition.
I’d like to see more youth league coaches and parents focus on the thrill and fun that comes from competing and the quest to get better than the outcome of the games.
When that happens, it diffuses a lot of the tension from the scenarios we painted earlier. The ump may miss a call or the ref may miss a travel, but when you have the right mindset before it happens, it doesn’t matter.
I most certainly am not suggesting that sports don’t matter, nor am I trying to draw you into the “everyone should get a trophy” camp.
But things are not going to go perfectly in people’s lives.
They are going to get laid off.
Their spouse or kids are going to get seriously ill.
They are going to have a conflict with a neighbor.
We are not teaching kids what to do when that happens.
The message they are getting from too many of their leaders is that their response includes rage and blame.
That will not benefit them when they get older and helping them grow up to become solid adults should be everyone’s objective.
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