Commandment Eight: It’s not All about Winning

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I had this fever before my last competition in the previous season. I was so obsessed with the fact that one girl is better than me that I got nervous all the time and I wasn’t happy on the ice. Finally I got 5th and the previous competition I was 2nd I watched my video many times and I learned from my mistakes. I didn’t move my arms at all and I didn’t hold my landings long enough. Goals for the next competition – hold landings long enough and pretty arm movements in my program. Oh and a camel spin

Hmmmm…well, for all the reasons to want to win and get a medal – and let’s face it, they do give out medals and rank the skaters; events where everyone skates around and just tries to do a little bit better than they did last time and hugs each other a lot is called something else…I don’t know…Glee on Ice? – I’m not going to hold you over a very hot fire for the example you gave.

Okay, maybe actually saying “little snot” – or the equivalent – out loud regarding another kid put a toe across the line. I’m a firm believer that in nurture vs. nature, most kids are only as good as they are parented; repeat “Nyah, nyah, nyah” offenders who don’t have the medals yanked off their necks by their parents should be pitied more than anything else.

And I am the first person to make sure that my skater has some other goal in mind: land an axel in competition, skate a clean program, get a level 3 spin. And she’s risen to that occasion as she’s risen up the ranks and suddenly, really, everyone is skating at that level because they are hard-workers and talented.

Still…it is a competition against other people as well one’s self. It’s not just individually judged like a test session. I have seen my skater at times push a little harder, get even further outside her comfort zone and switch into fourth gear after a sort of “meeting the eye” of the other skaters during warm-up and then going all Seabiscuit on them with extra revolutions in a spin or sudden, glorious arms out of nowhere or an axel that was shaky at best all week. Healthy, “friendly” competition. Keeping it healthy and friendly is a trick, to be sure, especially when American culture points toward a competitive spirit moreso than co-operative endeavors. (For better or worse.) That’s where good sportsmanship comes in.

How was my attempt at justifying winning as a motivator sometimes as well?

I can understand your feelings about the snotty little skater. I admit that in any sport where a kid gloats, I want to see them humbled. I also have no sympathy for those kids who throw tantrums when they lose. I know that these kids are learning these poor behaviors from the significant adults in their lives, so it’s really not the kid’s fault. But it still irks me when a kid is not a gracious winner, or loser.

My skater is so hard on himself that I always try to tell him “Do the best that you can do today, and that’s all you can do.” When he’s being particularly hard on himself, I try to bring up examples of the top skaters who have had bad days at competitions and remind him that it’s part of the sport. And then I leave him be unless he wants to talk more about it.

Once upon a time it was about winning for us. Imagine my daughters surprise, switching over from ISI… the first time she DIDN’T win. It was a real eye opener. Eventually that gave way to… please just make it through this event without injuring yourself… now it’s … try to make it through the event standing up. Baby steps.

When my daughter won her level at regionals, a TOP level coach in our area actually stood next to me at the results and said “those judges didn’t know what they were doing”. Skating is not a nice sport, and it’s not always the skaters/parents that have issues! I get tired of hearing “your skater is moving up next year, right?” My standard answer has become “my skater will do what she and her coach feel is right for her”.

That TOP level coach is an Ice Troll.

May she eat dirt.

I like it, Jozet. I think you did a great job of explaining how competition can be motivating.

And you’re right: they do give out medals. Competitions have judges who rank the competitors.

I do think that the other girls out there help Ice Girl to do her best. I know that she wants to place – not necessarily get first, but place.

If she doesn’t get first, though, she’s not the kid crying her eyes out and insisting the judges are drunk. She’s also not tripping the little snots who flaunt their medals. Nope. That’s me.

Yeah, Lynne. I’m pretty hands-off when it comes to Ice Girl’s nerves, too. I say, “Do your best, that’s all you can ask of yourself.” She’s pretty nervous before a competition, but accepting of whatever the result is. I think she knows that the result is out of her hands.

I’m not proud to wish a 10-year-old ill. I’m not pleased that I egged on Ice Girl and encouraged her to smear the other kid.

But, I still am happy when a snotty kid has a humbling experience. I just don’t think it should be a 40-year-old vindictive mom doing it. At least, that’s what I keep chanting in my head as the snots pass me by.

Good luck to you, zambonita!

[...] Commandment Eight: It’s not All about Winning 6) Straight Line Step Sequence- This is a brand new pattern and was developed to show all of the [...]

Here comes the apostate- please don’t throw heavy objects at me.

If you don’t want to win, stop competing. There are lots of other things you can do with skating that doesn’t involve competition. I completely do not understand why anyone would compete at all if the goal is not to win. Even test track, Basic Skills or ISI but especially USFS competitive track competitions. If you don’t want to win, how in the world do you motivate yourself to compete well? Isn’t winning the point of competition?

That said, I understand that the point is to not be completely devastated, undermined or discouraged when/if you *don’t* win. But it is very very hard to motivate yourself to compete when you already kinda “know” you’re not going to win; to then have your coach and your mom saying “well, winning isn’t the goal anyway.” I’m sorry, but bull hockey. Winning is the goal. Clearly, you’re not going to win every competition; but by the time you’ve been competing for a while you want to be one of the ones they watch. You can have additional goals for each competition– clean program; land a new jump; get all your levels, etc. I would say, then, that the goal should be to win eventually– that means that at the end of your competitive career, you want to be one of the skaters with the ability to win. Think of it as an arc– you stay at each level until you make final round, or are always top 4, then move up and keep going at the new level until you’re in that top rank. You can do this whatever competitive track you’re on.

I guess you can compete for the camaraderie, or the life lessons, or something, or to put out a test program in a pressure situation. But DD did this with her senior ladies program, and I have to tell you it was brutal; because she wasn’t a competitor with a real chance at placing, she was more than 70 points behind the leader. She didn’t care about winning, she never competed, she had no desire to compete regularly or to win, and the goal was just to skate a clean program for the judges, but it was awful. Only time I ever saw her cry over skating. If you don’t want to win, or think you don’t skate well enough, what are you doing in competition?

/reality check

Here comes the apostate- please don’t throw heavy objects at me.

If you don’t want to win, stop competing. There are lots of other things you can do with skating that doesn’t involve competition. I completely do not understand why anyone would compete at all if the goal is not to win. Even test track, Basic Skills or ISI but especially USFS competitive track competitions. If you don’t want to win, how in the world do you motivate yourself to compete well? Isn’t winning the point of competition?

That said, I understand that the point is to not be completely devastated, undermined or discouraged when/if you *don’t* win. But it is very very hard to motivate yourself to compete when you already kinda “know” you’re not going to win; to then have your coach and your mom saying “well, winning isn’t the goal anyway.” I’m sorry, but bull hockey. Winning is the goal. Clearly, you’re not going to win every competition; but by the time you’ve been competing for a while you want to be one of the ones they watch. You can have additional goals for each competition– clean program; land a new jump; get all your levels, etc. I would say, then, that the goal should be to win eventually– that means that at the end of your competitive career, you want to be one of the skaters with the ability to win. Think of it as an arc– you stay at each level until you make final round, or are always top 4, then move up and keep going at the new level until you’re in that top rank. You can do this whatever competitive track you’re on.

I guess you can compete for the camaraderie, or the life lessons, or something, or to put out a test program in a pressure situation. But DD did this with her senior ladies program, and I have to tell you it was brutal; because she wasn’t a competitor with a real chance at placing, she was more than 70 points behind the leader. She didn’t care about winning, she never competed, she had no desire to compete regularly or to win, and the goal was just to skate a clean program for the judges, but it was awful. Only time I ever saw her cry over skating. If you don’t want to win, or think you don’t skate well enough, what are you doing in competition?

/reality check

It definitely isn’t ALL about medals….I have never seen a young girl so happy to place 12th out of 20 girls!!! LOL— she is new at Juvie, she is only 9 years old, and she had some BIG guns in her group this weekend. Not only that, she had to skate FIRST– like FIRST in her group, and FIRST of the entire 60 juvie skaters. She did it, and she felt good about it…even without a medal.

It definitely isn’t ALL about medals….I have never seen a young girl so happy to place 12th out of 20 girls!!! LOL— she is new at Juvie, she is only 9 years old, and she had some BIG guns in her group this weekend. Not only that, she had to skate FIRST– like FIRST in her group, and FIRST of the entire 60 juvie skaters. She did it, and she felt good about it…even without a medal.

It definitely isn’t ALL about medals….I have never seen a young girl so happy to place 12th out of 20 girls!!! LOL— she is new at Juvie, she is only 9 years old, and she had some BIG guns in her group this weekend. Not only that, she had to skate FIRST– like FIRST in her group, and FIRST of the entire 60 juvie skaters. She did it, and she felt good about it…even without a medal.

Competing is fun for the kids. They get shiny medals. They skate in front of the crowd. Grandma and Grandpa come to watch them skate. They get to wear pretty dresses.

Keep in mind that skaters start preparing for competition a few months before the competition. At that point, they are aiming for first. When the competition comes up, they are not as ready as they thought they’d be, and at that point the goal is to skate a clean program. Sometimes they are stuck in the level that they’d tested to.

It’s not that we don’t want to win, or don’t want to place first. Things change. Our skating is not as we expected it to be two months ago. It’s atrocious not to compete just because we don’t have the goal of placing first. The life lessons are, in fact, completely invaluable. Just ask my mother. And we could still place first, if we do unexpectedly well or the competition does not so well.

Your DD shouldn’t have competed if she had no desire to compete. Having no chance of placing had nothing to do with it.

This is where my daughter is: jumped up to Juvenile level after starting the year at pre-pre (barely). child wanted to get all her doubles, blah, blah, blah, but also wanted to go to Regionals at qualifying level and try to knock some socks off. We did competitions at each level in between, and she seemed solid 1-5 in the placings.

Now, I think she’s going to have a wake-up call – again – but she’s driven. She’s okay with placing lower at a new level, she’s okay with flubbed programs, but yes…there are rankings, and eventually, there comes a time and a place when she says, “This time for real. This time I want hardware.”

And I gotta say…as the mother of daughters, it’s kinda cool to see that My Turn, Get Outta My Way attitude in my girls. (Sort of my version of “little snot”.)

/feminist puffery

I think this is an arguement of do you want your child to “Do Well/Skate their BEST” or do you want them to WIN? One does not necessarily lead to the other. (In a dream world maybe but not our world!) This is an important life lesson. You can present your best at a job interview and still not get the job. You could study for a month, do your very best on a test and still not get an “A”. You can do your very best all through high school and still not get into the college of your choice. In figure skating (or any sport) the goal should – yes – always be to win, your goal in life should be to “win” too. You may not always acheive your goal and – here’s where it can get tricky – that is OK. Yes, it really is OK. If you are working your hardest, practicing, skating your very best program then even if you don’t win you should still be proud. I DO NOT think that kids who always “Win” at everything learn too many REAL life lessons. I actually have much more respect for kids who skate FOR THEMSELVES – to do their personal best, even though they know they probably won’t “win”.
My own daughter started out in ISI – competed at about 5 or so competitions a year from the time she was Alpha to Freestyle 5. She nearly always got first – (keeping in mind this was 1st out of a group of 4 to 9 skaters!) There was once that she didn’t even skate her best but she was still better than the others so she still got 1st place. She felt NO pride over that 1st place medal – it was an “empty victory” so to speak. After starting to land some doubles she started to compete in USFS – she wanted competition to be more challenging. What a different world it is! In ISI there are almost never more than 10 girls in a group – then go up to Juvenile where there can be 15 to 20 girls in one group! If my daughter would place in the top half of the group she would be thrilled! So I do understand what the PSA is trying to say – it should never be all about winning – it should be about SKATING – after all if it was only about winning there would only be about 20 or so girls at each big USFS competition, only the ones that have a chance of winning right??? It’s about whether or not you LOVE to SKATE – NOT whether you love to “Win” – Yes we all love to win, that is human nature – but not winning does not equal failure. Failure is failing to ever get out on the ice at all.

I have been competing for about three years, and have done somewhere between 10 and 15 competitions in that time. I have always been the one that, for various reasons, is not at the level of the other girls in my group, be it because I didn’t prepare enough or just didn’t have the jumps I needed to compete with the other girls. Because of this, I have placed last in every single competition except one. My goal has never been to win. I love competing because I like being able to perform while still feeling like it means something. I also do like being judged, despite how nervous it makes me. I am proud of the fact that almost every time I compete, I perform better than I did the previous time. My goals are always to skate clean, land a particular jump, hold a spin for a certain amount of revolutions, things like that. I know that I can only control my skating and I have no influence over what place I get. It does sometimes discourage me to go into a competition knowing I’m unprepared, but I get over it.

That said, I am competiting at regionals in about three weeks and it is the first time where my goal, aside form skating clean, landing my doubles and axels, etc., is to not place last. My goal is still not to win. If it happens, it will be a wonderful thing and I will be extremely happy about it, but I am not going in telling myself I will only have been successful if I win. I think to have that type of opinion takes the focus away from your own skating and puts it more on the other skaters, since that plays a huge part in where you rank.

I’m not saying you should completely disregard rankings, nor am I saying that competitions shouldn’t be taken seriously. I am just saying that, to have a goal of wining rather than a specific goal oriented to your own skating, means that your goal is focused more on other skaters in your group, rather than on your own skating, which I believe it should be.

Love that Sea Biscuit comment…I’m LOL

The boy that grew up in the house next door was quite a baseball player. Practiced every day, dad built him a batting cage in the backyard, special coaches, traveling team – all that stuff. He was great in little league, a star in high school, but when he got to the level of college ball he couldn’t hit against that level of pitching and that was the end of his progress up the ladder.

I see my daughter going up the ranks to the point where she will level out. She knows that is what happens and she knows to expect it. I am also telling her it is possible that all the hard work in the world isn’t going to give her the ability to do the triple jumps that you need to play in the big leagues against big league players. That ability is decided at the level of neural synapses, and all the working and wanting in the world won’t make it happen. If it did, there would be more than about three to five women in the world at any given time with a triple axel.

I just want her to come prepared enough to win while she still CAN win.

You are a very wise girl. Good luck with your goals and know that with your attitude and hard work you are already a winner!

I like your comment. If the kids don’t like competing, their parents should help steer them to other alternatives. However setting goals that are focused on self are productive where as setting a goal to win the competition is not. (There are so many things you can’t control, judging, how the ice is, etc.)

Winning is a desire, a wish, the outcome. If you don’t have that in mind, then don’t compete. But just because you set your goals for what you can control (your skating), doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have that desire for the winning outcome.

Many kids who are not talented to begin with might give up before they actualize their potential if they set their goal as winning. Like you said, there is a progression. You can’t start out winning everything from the beginning. Setting goals you can control and focusing on your skating will keep kids skating longer and potentially reach the top of the podium in time. That’s totally different from not having the desire to win.

Winning takes different forms. Life lessons and personal triumphs are nothing to be sneezed at. Sometimes the competitive forum allows people to reach beyond what they could without it.