The Winners Are Those Who Play With Pride

The season is more than halfway over, and we have yet to win a game.

Inside their silver jerseys, their tiny shoulders are starting to sag. Their opponents seem to keep getting bigger; the soccer field grows more foreboding each week.

We parents pace the sidelines at each game, stricken looks on our faces, low moans rumbling through our ranks as one scoring chance after another slips away.

“Close game . . . good try . . . maybe next week . . . “ We try to lift their spirits, but we’re running out of encouraging things to say.

A few weeks ago--when we were only three games down--this losing streak seemed so benign. “Don’t worry,” I’d tell my daughter. “No way you’re gonna lose every game.” It was a joke. We laughed. . . . There were wins to look forward to down the road. But it doesn’t seem so funny now.

Still, we send them out onto the field, clinging to the desperate hope that, maybe, this will be the game.

In the meantime, we’ve learned to celebrate the little things: We finally scored a goal, we had homemade brownies for the after-game snack, nobody cried when we lost this time.

*

Different sport, different daughter, different day. . . .

It is not yet halftime, and our school basketball team is already up by 29 points--32 to the opponents’ 3.

Our second-string players are on the floor, tossing up shots from half-court, from back corners. Our tiniest girl has been put in at center; our forwards told to dribble, to pass rather than shoot. And yet, it seems, we cannot miss. The other team keeps falling further behind.

And now I find even winning painful. . . . I cannot watch our team’s score mount without my heart breaking for the girls on the losing end of this lopsided game. Their parents rise to cheer, then fall back to their seats in dismay, as shots circle the rim, then teeter off, passes careen out of bounds off teammates’ feet. . . . We see the frustration in their daughters’ eyes as their team hustles down court to try again.

Our coach calls time out and gathers his team. I know what he’s going to say, but I wonder what form the message will take.

How can Coach Teddy--whose motto is “all hustle, all the time”--tell our girls they need to lighten up, so as not to embarrass this overmatched team . . . and still keep the pressure on to play hard, win big?

*

It’s an inevitable hazard of children’s sports, where future blue-chip athletes play alongside classmates who are just learning the game, where everybody must get a chance to play, and sportsmanship--not winning--is supposed to carry the day.

“Sometimes you run up against a team that’s just a lot more talented than yours. You can’t out-coach them, you can’t outplay them, you know there’s no way you can win,” Coach Teddy tells me later. “This time, that team was ours. Another day it might be us on the losing end.”

As a coach for more than a dozen years, he has endured his share of winless teams. “All I can tell them is to go out there and hustle . . . every minute. Never let the other team know you’re feeling down.”

You might not win, but you don’t let defeat steal your pride.

And winning big has its own lessons in discipline and self-respect.

“When we’re ahead like this,” the coach said after last week’s game, “I tell the girls to keep working on their fundamentals--good passes, good shots--but remember, we’re not here to demolish this team.

“You can’t go easy . . . can’t stop guarding them or let them have their shots. No team wants to be played that way. But don’t be out there laughing on the court, taking bad shots because you know you can. You don’t feel good by trying to make somebody else look bad.”

It all goes back to playing with pride, whether you’re on the winning or the losing side.

And while our girls put on a basketball clinic that day, the losing team scored its own victory in our coach’s eyes:

“They never gave up. Down to the very end, they were still trying to steal the ball, trying to shoot over us, even though we’re bigger, quicker. . . . They haven’t won a game all season, but they’ve got nothing to feel bad about. They showed heart.”

And sometimes, that matters more than the final score . . . more even than ever winning a game.

* Sandy Banks’ e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.