Winning In Youth Sports (hint: it’s not on the scoreboard)!

• stadmin
• June 9, 2025
• 6:33 pm
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• Winning In Youth Sports (hint: it’s not on the scoreboard)!

Over the past several years, the focus of youth sports has sadly shifted toward focusing on chasing plastic rings and preparing for the "next level," and away from the real wins of sports participation for kids: learning life lessons, creating lifelong memories, and spending quality time with friends.

Despite this trend, I've witnessed some incredible moments and heard some awesome stories that perfectly demonstrate the importance of playing team sports as a kid, and it has nothing to do with winning on the scoreboard or attempting to project whether a 9-year-old will make the Varisty squad in high school someday.

Youth sports should be about fun, friends, community, sportsmanship, teamwork, life lessons, making memories, developing tools to deal with adversity, and learning how to compete/win/lose with grace and class. Championships, batting averages, and E.R.A.s should be secondary.

I was lucky to coach my son's Little League team again this 2025 season, and the boys on my Intermediate squad worked hard at practice all season long, played great baseball in our games, were awesome teammates to each other, and played with joy; as coaches we emphasized these goals, as well as the mentality "ready to dive" and "next page" to remind them to always be ready to play hard and to forget any momentary mistake to focus on the next play. The combination of effort-based (rather than results-oriented) expectations and the hard work the boys put in at practices resulted in a lot of wins on the scoreboard.

By focusing on those areas and not gauging our ultimate success by wins and losses (I'm a firm believer that the wins come naturally when things are done the right way), our team went 14-4 this season, won the regular season, and made the championship game. The process led to the positive results in the standings.

Despite what some people who have seen me coach my kid's teams or read my blogs might think, I do want to win every game I coach in; it's just not the most important thing to me.

And in case there was any doubt that relentlessly positive coaching focused on building kids up in the intangibles can also win games, in 2025 my flag football team finished 1st, my PVYBL basketball team finished 2nd, and my RHLL Intermediate baseball team finished 1st 🙂

But all standings aside, my absolute favorite 30 seconds of the whole year was not a game-winning hit, a buzz-beater, a pick-6, or even my team's happy post-game meeting after clinching 1st place in Little League.

Like I said, my RHLL team played awesome baseball this season; our pitchers challenged hitters and walked very few batters, our defense made very few errors, and all 11 guys contributed at the plate. As great as we played most games, our players are still just boys who are actively learning and developing, so of course we weren't amazing in all areas.

One area several boys on our team really struggled with throughout the season was learning how to control their emotions after making outs when they were hitting.

For whatever reason, our mental toughness in the field defensively after an error was solid (the team was good at having a short memory and getting ready for the next play), however a few of the players would return to the dugout with tears in their eyes after any at-bat that resulted in an out. And these weren't game-ending or season-ending outs, these were just normal outs during the course of normal regular season games.

Despite what Tom Hanks said in A League Of Their own, we all know that there IS crying in baseball in youth baseball! And it's not all bad.

The boys' emotions were expected, normal, and even appreciated! We knew they cared. A kid who gets upset or frustrated after not getting the result he wants is a kid who is passionate about the game, and that's awesome! However, while their emotions were totally valid, their responses to those emotions needed work.

Identifying the too-frequent crying as a pretty consistent issue, the coaching staff spent a lot of time teaching tools to handle the disappointment of getting out in much healthier ways, both for themselves and for the team.

We taught them how to take deep breaths to calm themselves down, how to take their sadness/disappointment energy and channel it outwards to cheering on their teammates rather than letting that energy get focused inward and turn into self-pity, and how to turn the page immediately on the last play by instantly beginning to think about the next play in order to help the team. Our effort in this area showed really positive results over the course of the season!

Full-blown sobbing after a strikeout at the start of the season slowly turned into mild whimpering. Then that mild whimpering slowly turned into silent sadness. And then eventually that silent sadness turned into poker-facing their disappointment entirely and continuing to play the game with the same attitude whether their last at-bat ended in a hit or an out.

The progress was awesome to see, and I was so proud of the boys who showed obvious growth in this area.

A moment in the last 5 minutes of our season perfectly captured this incredible personal growth, and was a shining example of the REAL reasons why youth sports matters.

Let me set the stage: Intermediate Championship game at RHLL. My 1st place Rays vs the 2nd place Marlins. 6th inning. We are losing 4-2 and are down to our final 2 outs, facing one of, if not the, best pitcher in our division.

One of our players who started the season as a kid who would return to the dugout with tears in his eyes after every strikeout and many groundouts/fly outs, but who had improved a ton on controlling his emotions over the course of the season, got into a 1-2 count after swinging and missing and then taking a called strike.

With 2 strikes and the prospect of the season ending on the horizon, the tears in his eyes start welling up while the at-bat was still going on.

But then something incredible happened. Completely on his own and without a single word from a coach or adult, he asked for timeout from the ump, stepped out of the batter's box, and took a series of really deep breaths to calm himself down.

I was sitting on the bucket by the dugout gate a few feet away from him and could see him fighting back the tears, could see him trying to calm down, could see him trying to control his emotions enough so that he could get back in the box and give himself a chance to compete the rest of the at-bat.

What an incredibly mature response to his emotions!

Much more mature than many adult responses to emotions in high-pressure situations I see at youth sporting events these days 🙂

No matter what happened the rest of the at-bat, I could not have more proud of this ballplayer, but then something even cooler happened...

Just a few seconds after being in tears and on the verge of spinning out of control emotionally, our newly calm, cool, collected and focused ballplayer absolutely ripped a ground ball off of the hardest throwing pitcher in the division. He ended up getting out (WHO CARES!), and the "win" from that entire scene will never show up in the scorebook or on the scoreboard, but the "win" in personal growth and new-found tools to handle emotions will far outlast whether or not his at-bat changed the outcome of the game.

Through baseball, that young man learned something about himself, learned how to deal with nerves and stress, practiced overcoming adversity in a pressure situation, learned how to start regulating his emotions when HE noticed they were getting elevated, and then ultimately he had a great result...both in that at-bat and on the scoreboard of life.

THAT's why youth sports matters. It's not about batting average, or wins and losses, or cheap plastic rings.

It's about teaching our kids crucial tools and giving them the opportunity to learn and practice skills that will help them in LIFE.

That player is now better equipped to handle all the REAL adversity that adolescence, adulthood, and life will throw at him.

Who cares that he got out (he did) or that our team lost (we did)?!?!

As coaches and parents we should be striving to create good humans who are learning tools to help them in life; not trying to create future big leaguers.

Some cold hard facts for you:

Statistically speaking, here's what percentage of 2025 RHLL players will make it to Major League Baseball: 0%

Here's how many will grow up to be husbands and fathers and members of society someday: 100%

I've coached 25,000 kids since I moved here after my own pro ball journey ended short of the promise land. ONE has made the big leagues: Atta Boy Eli Morgan!

1 out of 25,000 = 0.00004%

Some played in High School, some played in college, and a handful made it to the Minors. But every single one of them, regardless of when their "career" ended, grew up to be an adult who needed tools to deal with the real world.

So instead of using youth baseball as a vehicle to keep track of career wins and losses, batting averages, or as a way to prepare for the "next level," let's use Little League to teach skills like perseverance, commitment, discipline, accountability, teamwork, grit, and hustle - skills that every single kid in a uniform this season will need to learn in order to be successful young men in the coming years and adults of high-character in the future.

PLAY HARD HAVE FUN!