The Mustangs

There was time when youth sports served as a great supplement to a child’s life. Youth sports helped teach kids about character and life skills. Somewhere down the road, I believe we have lost our focus on that fact, and sports have become life. It is no longer about the principles that our children learn as they strive to win, only that they win. It is no longer about the lessons learned along the journey to greatness, only the rewards which greatness brings.

When I played youth football for my dad, he would bring us in every Monday after the weekend game. The first  twenty to thirty minutes of practice was spent huddled around him as he talked to us about the previous game. At the time, I thought that he was just talking to us about things we did well, things we could do better, and how we could win the next game. As I look back, those talks went much deeper than the occurrences of a single game. He was teaching us how to be respectable young men. He was teaching us the principles by which champions lived, not just on the football field, but in every aspect of their lives. I remember on several occasions, I overheard the coaches from other teams asking him why he wasted so much time talking to the kids, when that time could have been spent practicing plays or running drills.

“It’s the most important part of the practice.” he would respond.

The other coaches would laugh a little until they realized that he was serious. Then they would look at him kind of puzzled. They couldn’t deny the fact that my dad had produced several championship teams while he coached youth football. And these coaches couldn’t understand how having the team sitting around him on one knee for a decent portion of the practice could be productive, let alone “the most important” part of the practice.

But it was in these team huddles before every Monday practice that we learned several principles:

1. Mustangs never quit.

2.  Mustangs may get knocked down, but we always get back up ready to fight.

3.  We’ll never play a game that is tougher than our practices.

4.  Mustangs will never lose a game because we were out-hustled or our opponents were better conditioned than us.

5. When nobody else believes in you, you have to believe in yourself.

6. Offense draws the crowds. Defense wins the ball games. And Special Teams wins the championships.

7. Pride-Desire-Hustle: the recipe for greatness.

8. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Everyone on the team is just as important as the next person.

9. If we lose, it was not one player’s fault or the result of one play.

10. Our opponents may beat us, but they will never break our spirit.

11. Champions are always confident, but never arrogant.

12. Once a Mustang, always a Mustang.

My dad never let us make the goal to go undefeated, and he never let us make the goal to win the County Championship. He always said that making the playoffs was a worthy goal. We lost in the championship game our first year, and then we never lost again, winning two consecutive championships. But it was in those weekly huddles that we learned to be champions. We learned to believe in ourselves. We learned to be champions in life, not just football. Although we were not aware of it at the time, my dad knew that the important thing was not the championships, but the principles of being a champion that we would carry with us for the rest of our lives. While other teams ran through their offensive and defensive playbooks or ran through drills, the Mustangs sat in silence, huddled around my dad, hanging on every word that he spoke.

The era of the Mustangs has long passed, but the  principles we learned still hold true. As parents and coaches, let us remember that the purpose of sports is to teach our children and our athletes principles that they will carry with them through life. It is not just about winning. It is about learning to be a winner.