26A-Celebrating Failure

During this semester there was one big failure that I experienced and in doing so it consisted of numerous small failures. This experience happened outside of class at my job as an assistant high school football coach. In my field failure and losing really go hand in hand and losing is something we became too familiar with this past season. Going into it before even taking the job we knew this situation would be tough as this school had lost 13 games in a row, but we still hoped our guidance would be able to turn this failure into a success. This was not the case, we lost nine games and failed to accomplish what we wanted to. However, this experience taught all of us coaches a lot about failure. Don't get me wrong, we have lost games every year with teams I was coaching for, but not like this. 12-2, 6-4, 9-2, those were the seasons I had become accustomed to. Over the course of those seasons we lost games and we failed to reach goals, but nothing like going 0-9 and honestly not even being competitive in most of our games. There were somethings that I learned for how to succeed in the future, but what this failure really taught me was that sometimes in some situations there is just too much going wrong that you will never we able to get control off. So basically I am saying that sometimes you are just set up to fail. I absolutely believe this was one of those situations and it led to a lot of coaches resigning, including me for the first time in my coaching career resigning from a school with no current plans to go elsewhere and simply because we felt like there was nothing more we could do to turn it around. There are just some things that you can't control such as: only having 18 dressed players in our last game of the season due to injuries and suspensions, not having a player on the team that runs below a 5 second 40 yard dash, and an all around lack of size. A lot of these issues that caused us to fail are just things that you can't coach or teach. We can't make a 5'10 175 lineman type kid 6'2 240 like most others. We can't control a kid from getting tackled and tearing his ACL. When you fail like this we can't make big enough strides in the weight room to correct it and we can't fix it all with scheme and coaching. There are improvements to be made by working hard these areas, but even if we did all of this to our highest potential it still wouldn't be enough. If you are set up to fail because of one reason or another you will continue to fail until you have the tools to come close to competing on the same playing field as your competitor.