Teaching kids to compete - the value of keeping score.

Wow. So you are framing all of this as black and white, where only wussies will vote "no".

I find it very interesting that you are only viewing this from your perspective as a father and not that of your son. Does your son want to go out and have fun with his friends playing a game or does he want to have the whole experience be based on whether his team wins or loses? Sorry for putting this in such black and white terms. The truth as usual falls somewhere in between.

Your soccer club has a no score rule for a reason. I suspect that they want the younger players to stick with the game and not be discouraged while learning it.

From my own experience as a U6/U7 soccer coach, I would lose half of my players if we kept a recorded score. Most of my players are there to have fun and not win games. This will change as they get older, I suspect, or they will quit the sport.

My soccer club has a "traveling" team for the elite players and they do keep score. (I would hate to be anywhere near the sidelines during one of their games.) If any of our players need the must-keep-score experience and are good enough, they can join the traveling team.

As a final aside, from my experience with soccer and little league, I only see the hyper-competitiveness that you espouse from the parents and never from the kids. I have seen one parent that got his kids to sandbag the soccer tryouts, so he could draft the best team, which he did. What a great life lesson that was. Cheating is the means to an end (winning).

 

I will this
If you a PRO-Score and competitiveness
please eliminate this phrase from your vocabular - "ACT LIKE YOU BEEN THERE"
and
other such non-sense statements like that

Rocket River

 

Yes, keep score. The great lesson is not only that hard work can get you success but that sometimes hard work isn't enough...sometimes you need really hard work just to compete. Sometimes you can lose and know there was absolutely nothing else you could have done to win.

It will help them in their future.

 

Its art.

 

I don't see why we sugarcoat **** to children. It just makes it that much more shocking and worse in the real world. What we do need to do is let people run the score, let them showboat, all that stuff. If you get your feelings hurt from losing a game, then you shouldn't be playing sports period.

 

I am not following you here.

 

Show your kids this and they will be pumped up forever.

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When you put competion etc in to everything
When you but a value system in to it
Don't be surprised or upset when someone uses that system to
be very much IN YOUR FACE about they fact that they are BETTER THAN YOU

You make Competition your primary thing
a Demonstration of ones superiority
well
you have to take the eventual ShowBoating and self-aggrandizing as well

Rocket River
"everyone want go heaven
no one want die"

 

To answer the bolded phrase, there was not a kid I knew growing up that did not play to win. I don't know what kinds of kids you coached but I always played with kids who wanted to win, otherwise, what is the point of competing? The few kids that did not care were generally disliked by the team and did not play very long.

Not to keep score is imo, detrimental to the child. Teaching them to be competitive at a young age is a good thing, and pretending like there are no winners and losers is lying

 

Not differentiating between a first grader (U7 player) and an older player makes no sense. Older players can handle keeping score.

 

I was not talking about an older player, I was talking about younger kids. At least that is how me and my friends felt from age 5+

 

You must have been an absolute terror in t-ball.

 

Because kids aren't as mentally or emotionally stable as adults are. They don't cope with failure the same way adults do. In extreme cases, one bad experience can lead to years of trauma.

I agree that parents should let their kids experience failure and setbacks, but setting them up to fail and throwing them into the "real world" is different.

 

+1 to both

Is the only metric of success or failure the set of numbers on the sideline? Will strides forward in personal skill level, game IQ, and team building be overshadowed in your child's mind by a 3 point loss? Should your child learn to measure himself against himself first, or measure himself against others?

You don't play the game to win, you play the game to get better. competition breeds improvement. There's a reason people quit when they could just keep racking up W's (ie. Jordan).

 

The whole world's gone sissified, man. No red pen grading from teachers, cookie monster has to eat healthy food instead of cookies, whatever. Kids need to learn reality eventually, and pretending competition/life shouldn't, or eventually won't, include measuring results eventually, is just asinine in my opinion.

I guess the question is at what age, as I think we all agree that eventually sports needs a measurement of achievement that goes beyond "participation" in at least some respects. I also think there is an age at which it just shouldn't matter, and the idea is getting kids interested in healthy physical activity and playing sports in general, as well as finding out what some might be good at eventually.

Firstly, I would say that competitive sports is about a lot more than winning and losing, and if we're afraid to keep score for fear of upsetting the losers or encouraging bad sportsmanship in the winners, then we as adults are placing too much importance on outcome, and ignoring the other really great lessons that sports can teach young kids... Teamwork, achievement through hard work, trust, comradery, fitness... to name a few. These lessons don't have to be lost just because someone keeps score... in fact, they may become more apparent.

Bottom line, in my eyes, at younger ages, it doesn't matter whether the league is keeping score or not, the kids will be as competitive as they want to be. You don't have to teach them to compete. The kids who want to play tend to want to play well. If it doesn't happen, they'll get another chance next time, or lose interest and find something they enjoy more/are better at... or perhaps even determine that they aren't all that interested in competition sports. These kids can count. They can keep score whether someone else is doing it or not. All that touchy feely no score stuff is good for a bad day or a kid who needs a temporary bit of encouragement through kid gloves, but as a life teaching mechanism, or a league wide approach to sports I think it is a disservice in the long run if continued past 6 or 7 for boys.

As has been stated, it's not a measure of their worth as a person in general... and a bad game/season/whatever should'nt be taken as some life failure... that's part of the lesson of competitive sports.

Scarred for life? Over a loss in a soccer game? Really? I hate to say it, but if that's a lifescar, it will be the first of many that get progressively worse. At the very least, it should teach the kids not to sweat the small stuff.

 

Keep score.


But whoever has the least amount of points will now be called the "runner up."



Where I'm from, "2nd place" is a nice way to say "loser number one."