On Tuesday, The U.S. Women’s soccer team put up a historic 13 goals in a shutout against Thailand. Many people are saying that laying a beat down to this degree is bad sportsmanship and sets a bad example for kids watching at home. I couldn’t disagree more.
Let’s remove the fact that these are professional athletes who do this for a living. Let’s forget that everyone involved is an adult who can handle winning and losing. Let’s even pretend that it isn’t the biggest and most important soccer tournament in the world in which the total number of goals directly contributes to your overall success. With all of this excluded, I still believe that it would actually be worse sportsmanship to let up in the midst of a blowout victory.
Listen, I’m not an athletic specimen. Pretty clear based on the fact that I have a blog. I’ve been on the losing end of quite a few blowouts in my time. But I wouldn’t change a thing about that.
See one of two things happen when you get rocked in a competition. Either you double down and train harder so that never happens again or it’s a wake up call that you might not be up to snuff and should focus your energy on something else. Both are fantastic options. If you are destroying someone in competition and then you start to ease up you just rob them of their fight or flight moment. If they don’t get humbled they may never push themselves further or find a more fitting endeavor. If I didn’t get dunked on so many times maybe I would still be in a gym at at basketball tryout instead of serving up this sweet premium content. Swish!
There’s also another piece of this. You may think it’s rude to blow someone out and thus you try to slow down by putting in your bench players. Want to know what’s worse than getting your doors blown off by the best players? It’s still getting your doors blown off but this time its by the kids who never even get to sniff the field. There’s always some fatso without even a dream of getting playing time who comes in during the blowout and has a hero moment that makes everyone go wild. Yeah it’s not really making us feel better that your equipment manager would be the best player on our team.
Anyway, win big and don’t give up. Lose big and don’t give up. Or just become a blogger. That works too I guess.
