Winners, Losers, and Competition: 5 Attitudes To Model At Camp
Winning Attitudes for Sports, Summer Camp, & Life
by William “Wally” Wallace
Wally has been driving Falling Creek campers to and from their summer adventure trips since 2016. Upon graduating from Furman University as a young man, Wally spent the next twenty years teaching in middle school and working in summer camps, interrupted only by four years spent serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam era. For the next decade, he opened and operated a wilderness guide service, led hiking trips, and taught his clients safe ways to climb rock faces and ride mountain bikes. For the last eight years through the present, he has been driving a school bus for Henderson County schools during the non-summer months.
Each summer the lads come to us expecting to have a good time. A few will demand that we supply them with it, but for the most part, kids know that fun is what they make of it. In 2010, I had the fortune to tour the United Kingdom with my daughter’s folk music band. One of the gigs took place at King Edward VI School, in Litchfield. Spaced along the walls of the sports center were placards, each with a challenge for the young athletes. I have borrowed from them to assemble the following thoughts on the attitudes that we can model while at summer camp.
What makes a “winner”? What is the most valuable kind of competition?
In the realm of games, sports, and life in general, we have winners and losers. The idea is to be a winner by attitude, and to avoid being a loser by lack of it. The five attitudes mentioned on the school placards were desire, aggressiveness, responsibility, leadership, and self-confidence.
Desire: To illustrate that a winner has desire, recall those times in your life when you announced your apathy towards some endeavor. “I don’t care” and “whatever” are two phrases which I have used to signal that I would not be on today’s winning team. We have to want to win, and want it badly enough to drive ourselves, body and spirit, towards our goals. If we don’t want to win, why bother competing?
Aggressiveness: I had a bit of a problem with this one, only for its association with meanness. I like the kind of aggressiveness that is assertive, but tempered by kindness. Let us be strong but gentle, showing forcefulness but in a refined manner. Being aggressive means showing initiative. Winners are self-starters and are not ready quitters. This makes them relentless in their determination to become better.
Responsibility: I detest the phase, “I take full responsibility,” when offered after an unfortunate event. My response is, “It’s too late!!” If I allow something bad to happen, something I could have prevented, I was NOT responsible. I cannot then excuse myself by claiming responsibility. I must do what needs to be done the first time. If bad things still happen, being responsible means that I won’t shuck off the blame. I will take it, and learn from it.
Leadership: The placard says that winners like to influence others and to take control of situations. I would put it differently. A good leader tries to make a positive difference in the lives of others. Winners tend to enjoy leading, but the leader/follower concept is not so much a dichotomy of personalities as it is a combination of useful attributes. The most effective leaders I’ve met are those who themselves had good mentors, and more importantly were willing to learn from them.
Self-Confidence: A winner has it. But, like leadership, it is a developed trait. If anyone would know about that, it would be Helen Keller, who learned to function despite being both blind and deaf from infancy. She said, “Life is a succession of lessons which need to be lived to be understood.” Winners aren’t born with self-confidence. They learn it by doing—but not without pain. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never done anything new,” said Albert Einstein. As our learning grows, so grows our belief that we can learn.
Kids come to us in the summertime. Let’s not label them as winners or losers, but help them to feel the reward of winning. It’s a reward to be earned by showing a strong desire, a tempered aggressiveness, and meaningful responsibility. Let us guide them towards being both leaders and followers, and we will happily take note of their growing self-confidence.
Winners, losers, and competition? The most valuable competition for me is to be better than the person I was yesterday. If our lads can succeed at this, they will never be losers.
Thanks to drivers like Wally, campers are able to be transported to their many summer adventures off-property, like the ones pictured below!