What Do You See?

I’ve been thinking about a mistake my son made last year.

It happened late in the season, in a game that mattered.

They needed a result.

And for some reason, that was the moment he decided to try something we had been working on.

Something new.

Something he understood, but didn’t completely trust yet.

He tried it.

And he got it wrong.

The other team got the ball.

They scored.

And immediately, I knew where his mind was going to go.

He’s going to blame himself.

So before the game was even over, I sent him a text.

I wanted it waiting for him.

I wanted it to be the first thing he saw when he picked up his phone.

I told him I was proud of him.

Which probably sounds strange.

He had just made a mistake that led to a goal in one of the biggest moments of their season.

But I wasn’t really thinking about the goal.

I was thinking about what happened before it.

He tried.

For weeks, we had been asking him to add something to his game.

To recognize a certain moment and have the courage to do something different when he saw it.

He saw the moment.

He made the decision.

He just didn’t execute it well enough.

Everyone else saw the last part.

I wanted him to know that I saw the first two.

That’s not always easy.

Especially when the consequence of the mistake is staring back at you from the scoreboard.

On the ride home, he had tears in his eyes.

He thought he had let his teammates down.

He thought his mistake might have cost them something they had worked toward all season.

I could have told him it was just a game.

But it wasn’t.

Not to him.

Not that night.

I think sometimes, as adults, we try to make disappointment smaller because we know there will be other games.

Other seasons.

Other opportunities.

We have enough distance to see that.

They don’t always have that distance yet.

All he could see was what had just happened.

So I didn’t try to tell him it didn’t matter.

I told him it did.

And then I told him something else.

This will make you better.

I told him that six months from now, nobody else was going to remember the mistake.

But he would.

And I hoped that eventually he would understand it differently.

Six months is a long time when you’re sitting in a car after a game thinking you’ve let everyone down.

But six months passed.

And he kept trying.

The thing he had been reluctant to do became something he was comfortable doing.

Then something he was good at doing.

Eventually, it just became part of his game.

Nobody remembers the mistake.

He does.

I do.

And I’m glad it happened.

I’m not sure I would have said that on the ride home that night.

But I can say it now.

Because maybe we’ve gotten this idea of failure a little wrong.

We tend to look at failure as the opposite of development.

I’m starting to wonder if sometimes it’s the evidence of it.

Think about what we’re asking when we tell a player to get better.

We’re asking them to leave something they already know how to do and try something they don’t.

We’re asking them to become less comfortable.

We’re asking them to make decisions they haven’t made before.

See things earlier.

Try different solutions.

Take risks.

And somehow, while they’re doing all of that, we expect it to work.

Why would it?

At least not all the time.

There has to be a period where the player sees it but can’t quite do it yet.

Where the idea is right and the execution is wrong.

Where something that worked in training falls apart in a game.

Where courage gets there before ability does.

Maybe that’s not a problem with development.

Maybe that’s what development looks like.

And yet those are often the moments when the adults get loudest.

Why did you do that?

Just play simple.

Get rid of it.

You can’t lose the ball there.

Some of those things might even be true.

But I wonder what the player hears.

Because we also tell them we want them to be brave.

We want creativity.

We want players who solve problems.

We want them to make decisions.

We want them to play without fear.

Those things sound great until they cost us something.

That’s when we find out what we really value.

It’s easy to praise bravery after it works.

It’s harder when the ball is in your own net.

That’s why I keep coming back to that text.

I wasn’t trying to make him feel better.

I don’t think it did.

He was still devastated when he got in the car.

I just wanted him to know that somebody had seen the whole play.

Not only the part that went wrong.

And maybe that’s one of our responsibilities when we’re entrusted with developing someone.

To see the things that are harder to see.

Perception.

Decision.

Intent.

Courage.

Not instead of execution.

Alongside it.

Because sometimes a player sees the wrong thing and makes the wrong decision.

Sometimes they see the right thing and choose the wrong solution.

And sometimes they see exactly what we’ve been teaching them to see, make exactly the decision we’ve been encouraging them to make...

…and mess it up.

Those aren’t the same failures.

Maybe they shouldn’t receive the same response.

I’ve been thinking about this beyond my son too.

Because it doesn’t disappear when players get older.

Grassroots.

High school.

College.

Professional football.

Same game.

Same problems.

Different magnitude.

Or is it?

The stadium might be bigger.

The consequences might be bigger.

More people might be watching.

But I’ve seen a kid sit in a car believing one mistake had ruined everything.

In that moment, I’m not sure you could have convinced him that anyone else’s disappointment was bigger than his.

Maybe that’s why what happens after the mistake matters so much.

Someone is going to help the player decide what that moment means.

A coach.

A parent.

A teammate.

Maybe all three.

It can become evidence that they shouldn’t have tried.

Or it can become part of learning how to try again.

Six months later, the thing my son got wrong had become part of who he was as a player.

But that didn’t start six months later.

It started on the night it didn’t work.

Maybe development isn’t only about what a player eventually learns to do.

Maybe it’s also about whether the people around them give them enough courage to keep trying long enough to get there.