An Ottawa soccer league
has ruled that if a team wins by more than five goals, the team loses the game.
You read that correctly. They lose the game.
Why the rule change? So that the losing teams not feel bad about the fact that they got shellacked. Heaven forbid they actually learn how to deal with failure, to lose with dignity and class, and how to overcome adversity. In the minds of the league’s incredibly foolish leaders, the children’s self-esteem must come first.
But how dumb do they think the kids on the losing team are? Will they not notice that the leading team has stopped playing hard? Will this not be insulting to them? Of course they will notice, and of course it will be insulting. Children are not dumb. When I lived in San Antonio, I served as a referee in a youth basketball league in which the scoreboard would never show a deficit of more than twenty points, for fear of dispiriting the losing team. Do you think they did not realize they were getting slaughtered? In this league, too, every participant received a trophy (and the exact same trophy), whether they finished in first or last place. (It goes without saying that there were no playoffs.) They basically got the trophy for breathing. In all my years of playing sports, I have won two trophies. Just two. One for a 1986 relay race, and one for a 1993 high school softball championship. Those trophies mean so much to me, because I earned them. There were no handouts back then.
Is there anyone reading this who cannot figure out if this league’s organizers have liberal or conservative leanings? (Even if they are actually conservatives, which I doubt, the action taken is certainly a liberal action.) In the liberal mind, feelings rule. They must do everything in their power to ensure that children do not feel bad about anything. Never mind the fact that one grows much more from one’s setbacks than from one’s successes. Never mind the fact that a baseball player can fail 70% of the time at the plate and still earn a spot in the Hall of Fame. To the liberal, short-term feelings trump long-term development. I do not think for a moment that the average liberal consciously realizes that he is favoring short-term feelings over long-term development, but in the final analysis, this is what happens. Intentions do not matter, results do.
As an example of the short-term thinking which went into this decision, did the league consider any of the following real possibilities? I strongly doubt it:
- The Tigers are winning 6-1 over the Bears. In the last minutes of the game, the Tigers lazily kick the ball towards the Bears’ goal. The Bears’ goalkeeper moves aside, letting the ball in, and thereby “wins” the game for his team. This is fair? This makes sense?
- Late in the game, the Tigers are winning 11-1; they refused to lower their intensity. Their coach, however, wants to legally win the game. He tells them to let up a bit, and they do. Will the Bears not realize that the Tigers’ goalkeeper is not making an effort to stop their shots? Will this a) help the Bears’ self-esteem, and b) make them better soccer players, since they are scoring garbage goals? Why not save time and have the Tigers kick the ball into their own net?
- At halftime, the Tigers are winning 5-0. Knowing that another goal might “lose” them the game, they dramatically lower their intensity. They have plenty of opportunities to score, but choose to pass the ball around, instead of shooting. Late in the game, the Bears finally wake up, take advantage of the Tigers’ low intensity, and score six goals, winning the game. This is a legitimate win? The Tigers could have easily scored five more goals, and won 10-6. But due to the league’s tunnel vision, they lost.
Jewish tradition teaches, “A wise person foresees the consequences of his actions.” As a general rule, liberals do not follow this advice. They are much more concerned with perceived (not actual, but perceived) short-term gains than with near-certain long-term losses. (Who cares if mandating [mandating!] diversity in hiring puts all those from the minority group under suspicion of not being worthy of their position? Liberals feel good because more blacks, Latinos, women et al are now being hired!) While they may bristle at this notion, it is certainly better than the alternatives – either that they are incredibly naïve about the results of their actions, or that they do understand what the long-term losses will be, yet do not care. Some intellectual honesty would be refreshing.
Once again, to the liberal, feelings trump standards. Who cares if the new rules turn the league into a joke? What matters is that their children feel good about themselves.
But as I have demonstrated, even that is not going to happen anyway.
