Kids will lose out if everyone wins

IN one of those annoying cases where your personality traits don’t quite match physical attributes — I’ve always been incredibly competitive.

It’s not something that has manifested recently, it has been quietly present through playground days right into the beginnings of adulthood.

My mother once told me my kindergarten teacher approached her one afternoon to relay her observations of the then three-year-old me.

“Don’t worry about it, it’s a good thing,” my mum was supposedly told.

My high school PE teacher would 10 years later say the same thing. Must have been the way I threw the dodge ball.

Sure, sometimes a mean competitive streak and a sincere hatred of losing can be a motivator, but on the other hand, it can make you a pretty sore loser.

No one likes that person who cracks it when they don’t get Mayfair in Monopoly, or when they get hit with a draw four in Uno by a supposed “friend”.

Sometimes you have to choke back the crazy and smile through the pain. When it comes to sport I may have the competitiveness but I certainly don’t have the physical ability to back it up. The only sport that I’ve been semiOK at is netball. I stumbled my way through 11 years of junior netball at Newtown & Chilwell and, funny enough, that was where I learnt the invaluable skill of losing. This all, of course, was before Newtown recruited a mass of star players. Back then we were the proverbial Brisbane Lions of the GFL junior world, turning up hopeful each year and leaving with a single win or two under the belt. But no matter how many digits were clocked up against us on the scoreboard each week, we’d turn up with the same determination and leave with a goal of what to improve on.

It sucked, but what it taught me was sometimes no matter how hard you try, it’s not going to be enough and that’s OK. Whether it be on the netball court or in the workplace, you’re going to have a hard time reaching a win without learning to take a loss.

You see a lot of junior sport these days going away from the conventional winners and losers format in favour of an everybody-wins format of participation — and that’s going to hurt kids in the long run.

In the meantime, I will continue to relish in my retirement from “competitive” netball and try really hard to enjoy the odd round of “social” sport (not that I’m really sure what social sport is).