Fall seven times, stand up eight - Japanese Proverb
How would most people react if they failed 70% of the time? In baseball, failing 70% of the time makes you an elite player and provides you with an excellent opportunity to reach the hall of fame.
Over the weekend, one of our players struck out 5 consecutive times and after the 5th strikeout went back to the bench and started crying. Here is a 15 year old who is doing everything he can to improve and give himself a chance to make the spring team and he felt like his world was over that day. To be honest, this might be one of the best things to happen to the young player because now he has an opportunity to deal with the failure and learn that failure in itself is not bad, if you can learn from it and get back up from the failure.
One of the things I see in high school sports is the overwhelming desire to shun failure and to do everything you can not to fail. Players, coaches and parents do everything they can so the player does not fail. Whether that means not challenging the player to play tougher competition or codling the player to not strive for excellence and perfection in his skills.
I believe that not allowing athletes to fail and learn how to deal with failure is a major shortcoming in amateur sports. I know of many occasions where players never experienced failure in high school and did not develop the coping skills and determination needed to overcome these failures. When these players eventually failed at the collegiate or professional level, they could not bounce back and they did not have the skills to cope with failure. In turn, they were never able to fully recover from each failure, each successive failure became worse and worse and eventually they were not able to continue playing at the collegiate or professional level.
I think we need to put our young athletes in positions to fail so that they can learn that it is not the end of the road or the worst thing to happen, but it is a needed lesson in order to achieve the larger things in life.