The Washington Generals

I'm pretty sick of lessons.  You can take a lesson from each defeat, but if you try, try again and only come up with lessons, what have you got?  I'm afraid you have to win in there once or twice.  Full disclosure: you actually have to win quite a few more times than that.  You just can't have fallen on your face a thousand times and come up being proud of how much you've learned.

I spent four seasons as an assistant coach for a school softball team.  A couple of those seasons went winless.  That was around 30 games in a row without a win - most times getting completely blown out.  One season had one win.  For the final season, I helped build a batting cage, got a generator so we could run the pitching machine outside, gathered more equipment for batting training, and went out there every day before practice to set it all up.  I also took slo-mo video of every player's swing so the coaches could help pinpoint ways to improve.  I kept stats at every game and offered advice on the lineup.  With our head coach being a Long Island native, I found out how they ran practices at Hofstra and got him to follow that model.

That season had three wins.  One of those wins was a playoff game, which the school hadn't seen since sometime in the 1970's.  The season still had plenty of blowouts.  My takeaway from it all is definitely not how much I learned.  Anything I learned about defeat, I learned within the first few games of the first season.  There are some useful things to take from defeat, but it's really not that complicated.

And coming up with three wins in a season doesn't suddenly negate all the defeat.  It's really not that simple.  There's only so much learning and character building a person needs to do.  Eventually you have to parlay it, otherwise it's pretty worthless.