A soccer league in Canada is making a really really really silly move by introducing a rule that declares any team that wins a game by more than five points will actually…LOSE!!!
What madness has been loosed on Western civilization where adults believe this to be a good idea? Can any adult honestly believe that children today don’t have enough self esteeem? My exeprience is that young people seem extremely confident and ignorant and bratty than ever before.
Why? Because their parents have taught them that to lay down and lose by five points is to win. That’s why.
There’s an old Chinese proverb that says “Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.” We are teaching our children to not get up with this kind of silliness. We’re teaching them that being knocked down and staying down is a virtue.
You know, my kids all played basketball and soccer. And the basketball teams always kept score. But the soccer leagues refused to keep score the first few years. But you know who knew the score? The kids. They at least knew who won or who lost. It didn’t destroy any of them. My kids got Icees after the game no matter what they did.
Losing teaches us how to win. This is the kind of thing that’s easy to joke about but the scary part is that it really does have a negative effect on kids.
An ironic thing is that while parents attempt to protect children from losing a soccer game they think it’s ok for them to be handed condoms in the sixth grade and so many parents allow them to be sexually active at any age. Hey, you think that the kids living a consequenceless existence could play a role in thinking they can have consequenceless sex and treat each other like garbage as they grow older.
Update: Momma at Weasel Zippers said:
I’d yank my kids out of a league like this. I want my kids taught that anything is possible, Hail Mary passes do exists, and that you never, ever give-up. In my house we treat ‘I can’t’ and ‘I give up’ as swear words. If my kids utter either saying, they will immediately get 30 minutes of doing whatever it was they couldn’t/wouldn’t do.
June 4, 2010 at 3:53 am
Not a league for my 6-year-old son, then. He once scored 10 goals in a single game.
He'd be kicked off the team as a liability in Ottawa.
June 4, 2010 at 3:55 am
When everyone is super, no one will be.
June 4, 2010 at 4:52 am
I remember when "Harrison Bergeron" was satire…
June 4, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Learning how to win OR lose counts as important lessons in life for a child. One of the harshest realities for my 26 yr. old son, raised in the "everyone is important, everyone needs to be heard, no one really loses and your feelings always count" enviornment, has been to learn that life isn't fair. It's always good, but never fair.
The good news is, that nonsense can be knocked out of our youth in short order. He's relearning a lot things but he's doing it.
June 4, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Just remember to always keep your feet off the ground.
blog about drugs
June 4, 2010 at 2:41 pm
@Blackrep…. Syndrome knows…
June 4, 2010 at 3:30 pm
So if a team is ahead by four points, logically to win the opposing team would stop playing. But the winning team would stop playing too, otherwise they'd lose.
Then what? Tea? UN council debates? Spontaneous hugs? The mind boggles.
June 4, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Again – score one for Blackrep. (OK and Kevin too)
The headline on this is just about as perfect as can be.
The observation that, "young people seem extremely confident and ignorant and bratty than ever before." is also spot on. It is (one) reason why I don't watch American Idol. My heart just breaks for these kids who have been lied to by their parents and society to the point that they have no scintilla of an idea about how horrible they are at singing, and I assume, they also think that "if they just try hard enough they can do anything" and all that nonsense.
People are different, we all have different talents and one of our tasks in life is to discover those talents and use them for God's good. If these young (whippersnappers) people are taught that we are all equally talented, that no one wins, and that no one looses, they are in for a very rude shock.
Anyone else think this is all a part of the effeminization movement?
Playing soccer in France, our team of Europeans and one American (me) played the team from a neighboring town – one bottle of champagne per point. We beat them 10-0, but not only were they gracious, we also had quite a fun party with them afterwards. There was no shame in loosing for them. (Of course they were French – sorry 😉
What a drab life some are creating for us.
June 4, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Essentially, this rule would create a bunch of teams trying to score on themselves. If you're winning by four, just score on yourselves to so that you can score on the other team again. Likewise, a team losing by four could try to score on themselves to give themselves the mercy "win".
June 4, 2010 at 7:15 pm
That's an interesting twist on the game. Now coaches have to decide to go for the traditional strategy of scoring more goals (but not too many of course) than the other team or the new strategy of trying to score as many own-goals as you can to force to the other team to lose according to this "mercy" rule.
Imagine a game where both teams use the own-goal strategy. Each team will be defend their opponents goal and trying to score in their own. The goalies will go from being defenders to the ultimate offensive weapons (well sort of if you call scoring on yourself offense). Teams will try to feed the ball to to their goalie so he can pick it up and run it unhindered into his own goal. You'd probably see teams try to counter that by triple covering the opponent's goalie.
Heck, this is just the high scoring excitement soccer needs to increase in popularity.
June 4, 2010 at 7:49 pm
Oh man, they should just go full-on super crazy with this idea. Here's my plan:
At the end of the game if goal differential of the "winning" team is 1 to 4 or 10 to 14 or 20 to 24, etc. the "winning" team wins. If the goal differential is 5 to 9 or 15 to 19 or 25 to 29, etc. the "losing" team wins.
Wait, no even better. If the differential is odd the "winning" team wins. If it's even the "losing" team wins. You'll have no more problems with talented teams blowing out their opponents – each team is always only one goal away from winning no matter what the score is. The losing team will be able to score in either goal to take back the lead.
It'd be mayhem out there with teams alternating between trying to score on their opponents, or score on themselves, or just keep the ball away from the goals. I think I might actually watch soccer if it were played this way.
June 4, 2010 at 7:54 pm
@ William…… you are sorely mistaken. When a team goes down 4 points, the logical solution is not to stop playing, but to score an own goal instead.
Then, Icees for everyone.
Except of course, the losers, who should now go sit in a corner and reflect about how terrible it was they scored four goals on another team, forcing them into soccer-suicide.
June 4, 2010 at 7:56 pm
Actually, wait. I see how this can be an awesome twist on soccer…
Once a team goes down 4-0, they try to score an own goal, but the other team has to PREVENT them from scoring an own goal.
So now the whole course of the game changes, and the team who is up by 4 points has to defend the goal they were previously attacking.
Clever Canadians….
June 4, 2010 at 8:08 pm
Don't they have the answer for this in Little League? Our league has a 6-run per inning rule, and if, after 4 full innings (they only play 6 maximum anyway) the other team is up by 10 or more runs, they declare the game over and the winning team wins…makes all the kids:
a) play enough baseball to make it worthwhile to head out to a game
b) try harder to get under the 10 run differential if they want to keep trying to come back
c) puts the losing team out of their misery if they're getting completely blown out
Could easily apply that kind of a rule to 3 full quarters of soccer or something…