There was a time when losing was considered an unavoidable — and even valuable — part of competition. You played the game, votes were counted, awards were announced, and sometimes you simply came up short. You might have been disappointed, angry, or convinced you deserved better, but eventually you accepted the result and moved forward (and often learned form the loss!). Increasingly, however, accepting defeat seems to have become optional. It raises an important question: What happens to sportsmanship when people increasingly believe that a legitimate result is only legitimate if they like the outcome?
The importance of accepting defeat
When people don’t like an outcome today, there is a growing temptation to declare that something must have been unfair, biased, corrupt, or “rigged.” Certainly, legitimate cheating and injustice occur and should be challenged, but there is an enormous difference between questioning an outcome because there is credible evidence something went wrong and questioning it simply because we don’t like the result. In other words, we need to retain the ability to distinguish between “I don’t like this outcome” and “this outcome wasn’t legitimate.”
Psychologically, our difficulty doing this isn’t surprising. Losing hurts because it threatens the ego and conflicts with what we want to believe about ourselves and the groups with which we identify. If I believe my team is better than your team and your team wins, I can acknowledge that perhaps you were better that day — or find another explanation that feels a lot better, like the officials cheated us, the coach played favorites, or the game was rigged.
Psychologists call this self-serving bias — our tendency to take credit for positive outcomes while blaming outside forces for negative ones. There is also a locus-of-control component. Instead of asking what could have been done differently, it’s much easier to ask, Who did this to me?
This cultural shift becomes particularly concerning when it reaches youth sports. Consider a 12-year-old baseball player who strikes out to end a championship game. A parent can say, “I know that hurts. You played hard. Sometimes you lose. Let’s learn from it and get better.”
Or the parent can say, “That umpire screwed you. You guys should have won.”
The second response probably feels better walking to the parking lot. The first may serve that child considerably better for the rest of his life.
Final thoughts
It is very possible — in fact, likely — that at some point in the future your child won’t make a team, isn’t selected as an All-Star, loses a starting position, or doesn’t receive an award. Sometimes politics, favoritism, poor officiating, and genuinely unfair decisions occur. But if unfairness becomes our default explanation whenever we don’t get what we wanted, what incentive does a young person have to examine shortcomings, work harder, and improve? One of the most important lessons sports can teach young people isn’t how to win, but how to lose, accept the result, shake someone’s hand, learn something — and come back even stronger tomorrow.
drstankovich.com
