“We stink coach!” kids in movies say after a baseball game in which they got slaughtered. These kids are sweaty, dirty and dejected.  

“C’mon fellas,” the coach, and the star of our movie, says. “We can turn this around. It is just one game.” The coach might use some quote from Vince Lombardi or Winston Churchill to inspire them, but the groaning kids tell him that it’s no use. We all know the coach will find some way to save the team in the movie, but I’m here to tell you that the scene of the sad, dirty, dejected players does not happen, at least among the 5-8-year-old range kids I know. The kids on my son’s baseball team might want to win, because who doesn’t, but they’re not as wrecked by failure as much kids in movies. Those kids read lines written and directed by middle-aged men who basically want to help us rewrite our past in a disaster-turned-glorious theme. 

It might be tough to remember our childhood as it actually was, as opposed to the way we want to remember it, but we didn’t really care if we won a game or not. We enjoyed doing all the things we could do with a ball when we were young, and we enjoyed running around and playing a sport with other kids, but did we really care how many points we scored? The way I played, to a certain age, was as if it were almost a coincidence that my friends, and our opponents, decided to get together to play a game on this day. It’s almost as if our parents decided that instead of letting us play in the backyard, they signed us up to let play here. Again, winning is always better, but did we, and do they, truly understand the difference between those who can and those who can’t. If they learn the difference, will they seek private coaching sessions to take them to the next level? Did we care? I know I didn’t.  

We see the natural abilities they have, and we know them as well as we now know how naturally gifted we were, even if we weren’t. We know the difference between us and those who succeeded on the field was that we were never “coached up”. So, we want them to maximize whatever natural gifts they might have, but the crucial ingredient we forget is that it’s all about us. They don’t truly care, no matter what they might tell us.

We care, the parents and coaches care, and to some degree it is about us. It’s about our super-secret, unspoken comparative competition about who is a better parent. It’s about my kid can catch, yours can’t. One plus one equals I’m a better parent than you, because I’ve spent more hours in the backyard with him. Most parents aren’t like this, to be fair, they just cheer their kid on, and they’re often just happy to be there.

The full impact of parents watching their kids play sports didn’t fully hit me, until I watched a micro soccer game involving kids significantly younger than mine. A part of me knew it was kind of silly to get so into a game involving humans who just learned how to walk about 1,800 days ago, but I obviously couldn’t shake the sports’ spectator viewpoint I gained watching adults play for decades. I didn’t gain proper perspective on this, until I saw those parents scream their heads off when their five-year-old kicked the ball. Then, when he kicked it, they encouraged him to kick it again, and they encouraged him, at high-volume, to continue kicking it until it crossed the goal line. 

When they lose, especially when it’s a blowout, we parents don’t care for their post-game smiles. We don’t want to see them dejected, and we’ll “It is just a game Bruno” them in the aftermath, but we don’t want to see them smile, laugh, or enjoy playing with their friends afterwards either, and it just rubs us the wrong way when they run with excitement to the concession stand with their post-game food tickets.

In a number of leagues my son was in, the coaches gave them concession tickets to “buy” products available there. The kids humored him long enough to hear his post-game wrap up, and they nodded through his appraisals of their play, what they did well, and what they needed to work on. When the tone of his voice suggested he was near completion, and they knew his tones well, they got excited. They were right at times, but there were other moments when they grew overly excited over what happened to end in a hard comma. In the end, they weren’t excited by a victory or dejected by a loss, but what concessions they managed to find with their tickets. It was, for many of them, their first taste of purchasing power, not limited by parental consent.  

Middle-aged screenwriters often love to depict the spoils of victory and the agony of defeat, even in the form of eight-year-olds, because they want the arc of storytelling. They depict them as dirty, sad, and dejected after a loss, so they can depict them as clean, euphoric, and worthy in the end. It all makes sense to us, the middle-aged men in the audience, because that’s how we remember our childhood. 

If it were possible to attain a video of us failing in a crucial moment in our youth, at around eight-years-old, we might remember that crucial failure, because it haunts us to this day. What if we had some extended minutes that followed us to the dugout? What if, in those extended minutes, we saw ourselves laughing and playing with our friends. My bet is 9.678151 out of ten of us would be shocked. “That’s not how I remember it,” would be the theme of our response.   

An overwhelming majority of the kids I see on fields, playing games, don’t care near as much as we do whether they win or lose. If the movie makers depicted this reality, however, they fear that we might not care about their movie either. Kids have this annoying-to-the-point-of-frustrating habit of wanting to have fun while playing games. We know we were different. We were winners, even at their age, who cared far more than they do about winning, because we’re winners now. If we had that video of ourselves, as a kid, laughing with friends after a disastrous loss, we might find that we just loved playing the game. We were having fun playing it, and that’s why we kept playing it, until we became better at it when winning and losing actually meant something to us. If we remembered that correctly, our kids might look something like this: