On a side note, if you’re an athlete who doesn’t take PEDs, how do you shield yourself from someone spiking your food or water? (Trust me, I’m not asking to protect myself, I could take every drug out there and still not break a six minute mile).

The other thing kids know is how to measure themselves outside of wins and losses.
They know that losing 3-2 against last year’s League champion in soccer is actually a pretty cool thing, and beating a team of kids a lot younger than them 3-2 isn’t a big deal. Duke doesn’t get excited winning against a Division III…

I coached boys soccer (9-11 year olds) for a couple of years, and nothing was sadder than the kids who just wanted to win. They were whiny, cheating and dishonest, and probably not surprising, also pretty unwilling to work to improve themselves. They were also terrible teammates, because they were so focused on…

I always felt that if kids are winning or losing by massive margins, they’re in the wrong leagues. That idiot coach wasn’t doing his kids any favors by winning like that — if he really cared about teaching them to be better players, he’d have them facing better teams to the point where they were losing as much as they…

To be honest, the ultraspecialization hurts sports in the long run, too. Kids getting channelled into a single sport before they’re 10 is idiotic because you have no idea what the kid is going to be best at playing at that age.

That’s true and they never lost much either. It’s a simple fact of numbers that good athletes are going to have lost a whole lot more than bad ones — the bad ones never get the chance to play enough to lose much, so they don’t have much experience in how to handle it.

The thing that drives me crazy about damnkidsthesedays jagoffs is that if you take a look at any movie or TV show from the 50s, what are half the boys wearing? Varsity letter jackets. As in, an award they got for very possibly being the sixth guy off the bench on a 3-14 basketball team. Or maybe the quarterback for…