Where do you draw the line?

What do sports teach us?
The universal response – from coaches, parents and athletes alike – is always “life lessons.” 
We oftentimes champion sports for our children in the hopes that they will learn these valuable life lessons through their experience. But what lessons exactly do we hope they’ll learn? What life lessons do you think your child learned this past season?

Life Lessons Checklist
Here’s a checklist for life lessons we hope your athlete has learned or will learn through their youth sports experience.
1. Practice Makes…Better: It’s not about being perfect. It’s about getting better and improving. One of the life lessons we hope our children learn through sports is that their effort will be rewarded.
2. Focus on what you can control: Youth sports should help kids learn that all they can do is focus on their effort, and not the outcome. Focus on what they can control, not what is out of their control.
3. Let go of mistakes: Successful athletes brush off mistakes. They acknowledge them, they learn from them and they then move past them. They put them in the past.
4. Keep learning: We’re constantly learning – from our successes, but also from our mistakes. Youth sports should help kids recognize that even the best players are constantly learning and working to get better. It’s an approach to life that will serve us all well.
5. Being positive moves us further: LIYFA’s “Emotional Tank” analogy to a car’s gas tank is a good one. Just like a car’s gas tank, when our Emotional Tanks are full, we can go further. In a Responsible Sports environment, while coaches and parents fill our young athletes’ tanks, one life lesson for athletes to learn is the need for them to fill their teammates’ tanks.
6. Celebrate Success: Sports teach us to celebrate success – large and small. We all know how to celebrate winning the game, but sports can also help us learn to celebrate the smaller goals we set for ourselves, and see “winning” in a whole new light.
7. Become a true team player: Sports should teach our children what we mean by a true team player – someone who contributes 100 percent, and at the same time cooperates and collaborates with teammates to help bring out their best, too. LIYFA talks about being an impact player; making yourself better, making your teammates better and making the game better. It’s this lesson we hope our children bring to their adult relationships.
8. Win and Lose With Dignity: It’s called Honoring The Game in sports. Play hard. Play to win. Play until the very last minute of the game and don’t give up an inch until the clock runs out. But we hope our young athletes learn to both win and lose while respecting themselves, their teammates, their opponents and the officials and organization that help make their sport experience possible. As an adult, how we define “game” changes, but we hope sports teaches us all to win and lose with dignity and respect.