Coaching content provided by US Youth Soccer's Coaching Connection

By Dr. Alan Goldberg

When the National Semi-Final game suddenly and finally ended in the fourth overtime, I was too stunned to react. I knew “sudden death” meant the game was over when someone scored; yet, I still felt like, “There must be some mistake here! The game can’t possibly be over.” Fans around me were crying while others just stared blankly forward in shock. When I looked back to the field, many of the players were collapsed on the turf, overcome by exhaustion and emotion, completely and utterly drained. In the middle of this crushing defeat, Santa Clara players ran around the field in wild celebration. This was truly the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, side by side, and the UConn men’s soccer team was on the wrong side!

I felt this sick feeling building up in the pit of my stomach that kept me company for weeks and months afterwards, whenever I thought about that Friday night. After the game I talked to the team. I felt like I was giving a eulogy at a funeral. The guys had physically gone through the wringer this season and had played their hearts out in this game, and now it was all over. Both teams had played well and someone had to lose. Someone always has to lose. That’s the sad part of any great competition, especially when the losers played like winners. It seems a shame that the Huskies had to leave the field feeling like losers, which in fact they weren’t. That’s just simply the nature of competition. You win and someone else loses. Unfortunately, it was our time.

“Losing STINKS,” I thought to myself. No doubt about it!! It feels just awful. Yet, within any loss or painful setback lie the seeds to success. I hoped that the guys could use this experience as a source of motivation. I hoped that they would remember these terrible feelings whenever they trained and faced hardship, frustration and setbacks. Remembering how bad it felt can only propel you to go harder, to push beyond your limits, to get more out of each and every practice. It’s never how much time you put into practice that’s important. It’s always what you put into that time that’s really important. It’s the quality of your practices that count, and keeping a goal in mind while simultaneously remembering the pain of coming up short will dramatically increase the quality of your training.

That’s the thing about failure. If you’re smart about it and you use it wisely, it can motivate you to even greater heights. Being smart about it means that you don’t use your failures as an emotional whip to beat yourself up. Instead, you want to learn whatever you can from the experience; figure out what your weak points were, what you could have done differently, and then move on and begin to work on these.

Coach Reid had the team sit and watch the Championship game two days later, a bitter, yet important pill to have to swallow after coming so close. The guys hated this. It was incredibly agonizing to sit there and think that this is where you could’ve and should’ve been, “if only.” Success is ALWAYS built on your failures. Frequently, the more painful and bigger the failure, the more motivation and opportunity you’ll get from it to power you ON to later success. To do this, however, you must pick yourself up off the ground, dust yourself off and begin again. The only true failure is when you stop trying to go for it.

In the Spring the team met to discuss the mission for the year. It was a “no-brainer.” Everyone wanted to get back to Charlotte, NC to finish what they had started last year, to win the National Championship. We talked about what it would take, the sacrifices; the commitments; the physical and mental hardships of training; a summer spent on campus taking courses and getting ready. We looked at what went wrong, both team and individual weaknesses, and what was necessary to make the dream come true this year. In August, after the freshmen had joined the team, the guys developed a mission statement: the goals that THEY wanted to accomplish and what kind of team standards that had to be followed in order to successfully complete the mission. Each player signed a mission commitment sheet agreeing to abide by the team rules in order to successfully reach their goals. A signed copy was framed and put up in the locker room as a daily reminder of where THEY wanted to go and what THEY had committed to.

If you want to accomplish something – I mean REALLY want to accomplish “Something” –then you have to get very clear about exactly what your mission is. You have to spell out in detail, your goal and what you need to do to get yourself there. What’s it going to take? What weaknesses are between you and making that goal a reality? How much will you need to practice? How hard will you have to work? How uncomfortable will you have to make yourself? Are you willing to do whatever it takes to get there? The clearer you can get on your mission and the steps necessary to accomplish it, the better chance you have of seeing it happen. Understand that it’s always much easier to say that you want something. Talk is cheap! It’s much more difficult to follow those words up with action! Bottom line is this: How hard you work is how much you want that goal, not how much you say you want it!

Pre-season started and the reality of the grind set in. Soon it became clear who would get most of the playing time and who would be a “role player.” Role players worked their tails off in training, pushing the starters to their limits, yet rarely saw any action. Role players have the very hardest job on any team. They work, sacrifice, suffer and push themselves and yet they never or rarely share any of the limelight. Playing the game is what’s fun. Role players don’t often get to experience this. However, you can’t win a championship without a total team effort and without committed and dedicated role players. You can’t have committed role players unless the starters AND coaches respect and appreciate each and every one of the non-starters.

To be continued in the April 2007 issue of Cal South E-News...