Sunday, April 25, 2010

How you play the game ... not winning or losing

Utah Rugby Union official stats

Its interesting that the Highland losses are not shown in the win loss column on the Highland website. Difficult to explain when the losses this year alone are already at 5. Compared to 9 losses in 33 years.

Except for U-19 ,Highland teams are finding themselves in very competitive games every week, and at times on the losing end of the stick. How refreshing. Highland can be beaten.

Why is there such a wide contrast between the U-19 team that smashes every team by 60 to 120 points and all of the other Highland teams?

The answer is simple ................ 9 as in NINE import players on the U-19 squad.

The 33 year myth that is being exposed more and more each week is that the 379 wins is due equally to import players from New Zealand and not the coaching exclusively.

We are now giving long over due credit, to the the anonymous boys from down under.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION!!!!

There are few to no import players on the other Highland teams. The result is a level playing field each week and very competitive games. The way it should have been for 33 years.

The anomaly of the weekly 100 point wins further clarifies the self serving nature of this very bad policy. How is this positive for rugby? How does it build brotherhood, sportsmanship and good character.

Its not whether you win or lose that matters but how you play the game. Highland teams are now learning HOW TO PLAY THE GAME. How you play involves losing once and a while. Losing is an essential part of improvement. The Highland program will be much the better for it. It is amazing how positive a good loss can be for a team.

Welcome to the real world.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Very true, I am on the United fr/sph team and i was looking on the highland rugby website and i cant find anything on when we beat their fr/sph team and they had 11th graders playing down.

zach said...

Spencer, i play for highland and i am in 11th grade. I know how well your 9/10 grade team is because i have been playing you guys for 2 years now. But to make one thing clear we NEVER move our older kids down. We move our good 9/10 graders up. We have two sophmores who start on our V1 team and one more sophmore who plays on our U19. Your team is very good so just accept the win.

Unknown said...

Zach, I thank you for the compliment of our team. I believe that Highland does not play kids down all the time and wasn't trying to make it sound like I did. What I heard about when we played them for the first time at Murray was that the coach talked to our coach about letting some reserves from one of the varsity teams play and our coach was okay with it. Just what I heard.