Dealing with Failure
Success
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Failure sucks, and it is more frequent than success. The good news is that failure often provides an opportunity to learn. One hard thing to deal with is when your athlete chokes at a meet.
The first thing a coach should remember is that their athletes are fully capable of judging their own performance. Despite the natural reaction to display frustration by yelling will only make the problem worse. I can recall a situation in high school when I had to face this. After having a great week of practice, I went into a meet expecting a good performance. Hammer was the first event and I was warming up over 160, which at that time was about 10ft better than my personal best. Once the event started I ended up throwing low 150s. My coach was furious with how I did. He grabbed a roll of tape and threw it at me yelling, “you better make up for it in the shot.” Let me say one thing first, I loved my coach and have a great deal of respect for him. Despite this the manner in which he reacted crushed me. I felt terrible about my bad throw and even worse because now I felt like I let my coach down.
In general if the athlete is serious, they will know when they have performed poorly at a meet. Yelling at them and embarrassing them in front of the other competitors will not help the situation. At best they will walk away feeling like a lone failure. Worse case, they may leave the team due to a resentment of the coach, or loss of interest.
On the same note, they don’t want to hear fluffy statements that don’t help. Statements like “you’ll get them next time champ,” will make them think that forgetting a bad performance is the only way to get beyond it.. Realistically, failure is the best way to learn what to improve upon. Most bad performances (by bad I mean over 10% under your best, not missing a PR) happen for a reason. Maybe the circle was too fast or slow, didn’t eat before the meet, lack of sleep, nervous or a million other possible reasons. Instead of being upset with what happened, discover what went wrong and find a way to fix it.
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