Why did you lose?

“Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.” - John Wooden

Using Wooden’s criteria I would define NUT’s 2015 season as being successful.  Unfortunately I still have to answer those brutal questions: What happened?  Why did you lose?  At the surface these questions bother me because they beg for an excuse and excuses are for those who invest short.  An excuse is a mechanism that allows you to pass off ownership of a difficult situation and helps you sleep at night right now.  Owning a defeat shines a bright light on your weaknesses and deficiencies, pin points where you came off the rails, and stands as a beacon of how you can be better tomorrow.

But the questions still exist and the askers are waiting not so patiently for you to answer them; what happened? Why did you lose?

I believe we have a choice of perspective, both of which make excuses; there is no way around this:

1.      Give the credit to the winner:

Credit belongs to the winners for winning.  MSU beat NUT because they crushed us in the air, they pinned us on the downwind sidelines, and they helped their throwers out by making tough catches, all three factors were amplified in the wind and MSU won. 

2.      Take credit for losing:

Credit belongs to the losers for screwing up.  NUT lost to MSU because we didn’t win any jump balls, we didn’t complete passes off of the trapside, and we dropped a lot catchable passes, all three factors were amplified in the wind and NUT lost.

Although the points are identical the perspective here matters.  As a team when you “take credit for losing” you disrespect your opponent.  Imagine winning a game of ultimate and afterward overhearing the other team say things like:

·         If it wasn’t so windy we would have won

·         If we didn’t choke against their zone we would have won

·         If (player x) didn’t screw up we would have won

These are frustrating things to hear because even after beating them in a fair game they refuse to acknowledge what you’ve done.  They see themselves as the better team and write off your accomplishment as a mistake, the kind of fluke game that would have gone the other way nine out of ten times.

Not only is taking the credit for losing disrespectful to the opposition I think it works to hamstring a team’s ability to learn from the defeat.  The most accessible example I have are the Illinois v. Iowa games from 2012.  In 2012 Illinois lost to Iowa three times, each by a score of 15-9.  The Illinois kids would walk away from the games saying things like “if Iowa had played man defense we would have crushed them,” or “we choked against their zone we can crush it next time.”  Shockingly Illinois would lose over and over again.  We would belly laugh about how our team was great against zones because we had Ryan Smith, but we’d perform atrociously against zones¹, and then we would make ourselves feel better by saying that in a no wind game would smash the other team.  We never learned and we paid for it in the end.

Alternatively we could have said things like “they trap us really well on the sidelines,” “once we turn it they pick up and get going very quickly,” “they are set up for good angles on our cross field throws.”  With this kind of mentality we start viewing the Iowa zone as something to work through, something to learn from, rather than an asterisk over some losses.  Without a control group I am left only with speculation.  If we respected Iowa’s zones, if we had tried to learn from it rather than wave it off, if we had stopped using it as an excuse and owned it as a deficiency in our game would we have been better equipped to finish the game-to-go against MSU?

Moving back to NUTs perspective: we could walk away thinking “there’s no way that guy will sky us 6/6 times again”, “there’s no way we’d give up 2 breaks at the end of the game again”, “there’s no way Hair will lay out for no reason on universe again”, “we’re better than those guys and we’ll show it next time.”  Or we could own that we were the worse team, that MSU smashed us with their sideline trap and that we can’t beat that guy in 1v1 jump balls.  Then we can start working through these issues, we can become better throwers, we can buy into the need to swarm jump balls, and we can be better because of it.

^1. Iowa (15-9, 15-9, 15-9); Tufts (bageled in the first half); EIU (lost in quarterfinals of regionals); MSU (lost in the game to go)