Winning a fair played game against another team is our highest ambition as a club.
To win is a measure of our skill, teamwork, and organization as a club. In about 98% percent of this country these statments would be self-evident and so obvious as to not be worth mentioning. But we do not live in the valley, the lowlands, the red states, the corn belt, the Eastern sea board. We live in the West County and like many I was raised to believe that winning was bad and that all competition was evil.
Forward thinking parents like mine enrolled their children in droves into Recreational soccer. In pure ignorance and defiance it was thought of as the “non-sport”.
“Soccer” was a sport of no physical contact, team work, good excercise and earnest coaches who had never played the sport fostering an environment of peace and empathy.
Believe it, they did this with good intention. Their own personal experiences with baseball and football, where coaches spit on their players and parents fight each other and team moms conive to cheat, jaded them towards thinking there was anything remotely noble about winning. And who can blame them. A culture of “Winning” without proper perspective inevitably leads to bad sportsmanship, performance enhancing drugs, shortcuts, and a disregard for fellow athletes.
So out of this existential wreckage and moral relativism I have come to see more clearly why winning is important.
While statements such as, “let’s just go out and have some fun” seem innocent enough there is an insidious undercurrent of denial in such statements. Soccer is not a casual random activity – It’s improve theater with unspoken rules. There is choreography to the spacing and position of players. There is teamwork and strategy. It’s performance art and the referee is keeping score.
In the ideal world, winning is a reflection that we are doing things right and that we are playing to the best of our abilities. Winning holds people accountable for doing what’s best for the team. Take for example, the clever striker who prides themselves on their ability to dribble through traffic. It’s all too often this person will fancy their own skill so much that they will never make a timely pass to the detriment of the team. But it will be rationalized in their own minds that they are the only ones who can do such fancy dribbling and isn’t this what soccer is all about anyways? A focus on winning keeps these self indulgent moments in check. Did you make the pass to the wide open teammate standing at the top of the goalbox instead of trying that really difficult shot from the corner? Did you hustle back on defense? Do you communicate with your teammates?