How Athletics Shapes Character
It’s been wonderful to see the return of some student and community activities that the pandemic had foreclosed upon over the past year and a half. This includes Browning team sports. Our cross country runners are holding their weekly meets at Van Cortlandt Park, while soccer-playing Panthers from Grades 5-12 have made their way to the fields of Randall’s Island for friendly competition. While many of our boys have stayed attached to their own athletic teams outside of Browning throughout the pandemic, there’s something particularly fun and fitting about again seeing our guys clad in red and black, together, at the end of a rollicking school day.
The virtues of interscholastic athletics, when done properly, are well-known to us: The importance of preparation and practice, of teamwork and fair play, of accepting coaching and guidance, and of recognizing and celebrating excellence. What I think we often miss, however, is that sports may be the only enterprise in schooling where others are actively attempting to prevent you from realizing one of your primary goals. No one produces a game plan to keep us from learning the periodic table or mastering our vocal scales or simplifying an equation, but it’s different when we put on the colors of our school. While we first and always look to play our games with excellence, and not merely for victories, we shouldn’t deny that if we bother to keep score, our teams prefer to win—and so do the teams we face.
And this means, of course, that sometimes we’re on the losing end. Now, I’m never looking for Browning to be defeated in an athletic contest, but I do think there may be as much meaning to be found in a loss as there is in a win. It’s relatively easy to be coachable, to observe fair play, to be a supportive teammate when we’re winning; it’s a far different matter to embrace the right way of doing things when the scoreboard isn’t going your way. When we’re disappointed, it’s simple to dismiss others’ views, to take shortcuts, and to focus on our own frustrations rather than the experiences of the group. But this is exactly when athletics becomes a real classroom, when our coaches do some of their best teaching, and where our guys learn the most about who they can be as people.
“Winning a sports contest is a great way to spend our days; knowing how to recognize and pursue goodness in difficult moments is a great way to spend our lives.”
When I traveled out to Randall’s Island last week, I wasn’t happy to see our varsity and junior varsity soccer teams having difficult outings against some top-notch opponents; I wanted us to win, and our guys did, too, and so there was understandable disappointment all around. At the same time, though, I don’t know that victories would have made me as happy as some of the behavior shown by Browning players during these tough matches. When our outside back was fouled hard in a game that was no longer closely competitive, he didn’t complain to the referee or shout at the offender; instead, he graciously accepted the opponent’s hand and his apology, and went back to playing. When one of our teams lost the lead with the concession of three classy goals, those on the field didn’t look at the ground or call for a lineup change or betray any despair; rather, they urged each other to keep playing hard, with a chorus of boys on the bench cheering them on. And when one of our players scored the final goal—our only goal, against many for our opponents—in the waning moments of his team’s match, his teammates celebrated with him as though he’d just won the FA Cup. To me, these were all signs of an athletic program that was winning in ways much larger than a scoreboard could capture.
No one pulls on a uniform in the hopes that they’ll lose that afternoon’s competition, but as my own college coach used to say, “Some days, you just get beat.” It’s how we react on those days that marks us as good teammates and spirited competitors, surely, but which also prepares us for life’s larger challenges and potential setbacks, and vests us with the capacity to find our best—and the best in others—when times seem their worst. Winning a sports contest is a great way to spend our days; knowing how to recognize and pursue goodness in difficult moments is a great way to spend our lives.