(11-01-2021, 11:22 AM)Mikey Wrote:

(10-31-2021, 02:52 PM)TheO-LineMatters Wrote: This is a very liberal way of thinking. You want kids to grow up and be independent of make a way for themselves in the world, but you also want to shelter them from all the bad stuff. When you shelter them, you end up with entitled brats who need "safe spaces" so their feelings don't get hurt. You can't have it both ways.

I think everyone else in the thread is looking at this from the winning team's perspective and you are reading it from the losing team's side.

You're right that sometimes the life lesson is "try as you might, you're still going to be less talented, rich, smart, handsome, whatever the comparative standard might be, and it sucks." But at the same time, there's also a lesson that "you may be more talented, rich, smart, handsome, etc, but that doesn't mean you need to grind that fact into those beneath you on the ladder."

Nobody is calling for the winning coach to run a literal cover zero to let the losers score an easy TD. Nobody is saying the losing team are gonna never want to play football again for the thrashing they took last weekend.

It was a [bleep] move by the coach. Maybe that's the lesson for these kids - you can bust your hump, but inevitably you are going to encounter [bleeps]. You know they're [bleeps]. Everyone in the vicinity know they're [bleeps]. Heck, even the [bleeps] know they're [bleeps], and that's the biggest reason why they are a [bleep]. You just have to try to navigate your way through life tolerating or avoiding their [bleepishness]. It sucks kid, but guess what your pessimistic dad has spent his entire adult life doing, too? People suck. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll stop trying to enjoy anything.

Sadly, I think me kid already sees this too much.

Very much this. I don't fault the losers for losing, that happens and they shouldn't be shielded from it. I fault the winners for how they won and how they treated the losers, and there are valuable lessons there too that go beyond the football field. And isn't that the real purpose of scholastic sports, to learn values that we want to see expressed in their adult lives later on? Maybe it's because Jags fans don't have much experience with winning that these things are beyond some of them.

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