When you’re working in any business, you know it’s important to keep customers happy. Every business has a different value proposition, but some things are universal.
One thing I notice more and more in youth soccer is the correlation between how happy families are and whether their team won or lost. For some reason, winning does this magical thing where small problems don’t feel so important and everything seems great, while losing does the exact opposite.
Why?
A lot of kids and parents simply have more fun when they see their team score goals and win. And in many people’s minds, winning gets confused with progress or strong performance.
Another mistake: comparing professional sports to kids’ soccer. Pro teams are measured mainly by wins and losses, and they play in tightly matched leagues with full-time athletes whose job is to win games. That’s not what we have in youth soccer.
What winning actually says
In reality, a win only tells us that one team scored more goals than the other today. That could be because one player can shoot really hard, or one kid is exceptionally fast, or the goalkeeper on one side had a great (or terrible) day. It could also be because half the opposing team went to a sleepover and didn’t sleep enough. None of that automatically means your player or team developed better habits this week.
What to focus on instead: progress
Progress shows up in quieter places:
- Progress in decisions made
- Progress in technical abilities
- Progress in playing and competing together (supporting angles, simple combinations, communication)
- Progress in handling adversity (a bad call, a goal against, a mistake—how fast do we reset?)
These are harder to measure than counting goals, but they matter far more for long-term growth.
If you want a simple check after games, try this: instead of “What was the score?”, ask “What did you learn today?” or “What choice did you make better than last week?” It changes the whole conversation. Being excited about learning instead of results is the number one thing I would recommend families to life by every day.
To be clear, I’m not anti-winning. Winning is fun. It buys goodwill and keeps kids excited. I just don’t want it to trick us into thinking it’s the same thing as development. When families pay attention to progress week after week, the happiness sticks—even after a loss—and the wins usually start showing up anyway.
The families that “win” in the long run are already doing this. They celebrate the small steps forward, keep perspective on the score, and let improvement compound.
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