We all love playing games. We ask our players to work really hard in practice and training to allow them to be ready to play the game at their best possible level. We see the games as the chance to show the world how all our hard work and great coaching have lead us to the point of playing great softball.
Well, what do we do when we put all that work in and then play poorly? I mean we played bad. We didn’t just come up short in a hard fought game where the other team just outplayed us but, rather, we stunk up the joint.
There seem to be a couple trains of thought when this happens. One is to just get back in the saddle and head right back into the next tournament we can find. The other, is to take some time off from playing to practice and work on the shortcomings we discovered when we played.
To make the best choice I think we need to take a closer look.
If we can look at the games we lost and see that we did all the things we should do well, then getting back in the saddle makes a great deal of sense. However, if we played very poorly, then I think it is foolish to think that just playing more games will solve the problems.
Playing poorly is a symptom of a bigger problem. We need to take a hard look at the mistakes we made and design practices to address those issues. We can’t just talk about the mistakes we made and hope that they will disappear. We need to get back to work, practice to correct the mistakes we made, and give our players the repetitions they need to be better prepared for the next game.
Playing is fun! Playing badly isn’t! If we want to have more fun we need to practice more.
