How to Succeed Without Really Winning
Issue: Volume 28 Number 3
How to Succeed Without Really Winning
George Huitker
Ginninderra Press 2005
282 pages
RRP AUD$25
In How to Succeed Without Really Winning, George Huitker has truly given us a gift. He has taken the time to reflect on our tendency to invest so much in the outcome of a ‘ measly game’ of junior sport that the behaviour of adults — coaches, managers, parents and supporters — leaves much to be desired.
This book should be required reading for everyone involved in junior sport, much the way that coaches are required to sign a Code of Ethics. A copy could be shared among the associates of every team! Huitker has analysed the factor that has led us to take sport so seriously, at the club, representative and national levels. Increasing ‘professionalism’ has created a life and death attitude to sport, whereby each budding sportsman and woman has to be forever on the look out for what is best for them in pursuit of their dream. But is this serving the general sporting population? The percentage that ‘make it’ is tiny … that should not mean that all others have failed.
The author encourages us to look behind the result, past the personal angst and anger, to seek out the real successes from a match, so that we can search for continued improvement. Sport literally provides the playground for children to grow and develop, and much more is at stake than simply physical prowess.
In Part One, ‘Starting eleven’, the author draws on the views and experiences of several players, coaches and various sport professionals and journalists to develop a manual of 11 training modules to guide our behaviour when involved with junior sport.
Part Two, ‘Match reports’, tells the stories of two very different futsal teams coached by the author. The ‘also-rans’ who did not make the ACT representative under-16 side and the Radford College under-12s, where meeting the age criteria was sufficient to get on the team. It is a rip-roaring read which had me laughing and crying, often concurrently. Huitker’s passion for drama and prose are evident in the conversational style employed.
Finally, Part Three is used to demonstrate the reality that access to sport, both at the basic and elite levels, is not available to all. More the reason to ensure it is a place of unadulterated joy. Huitker summarises his beliefs on How to Succeed Without Really Winning into 17.5 Steps Towards Contentment and Fulfilment on Match Day. If the book is used as a guide, even once, it will have saved some juniors from the horrors most of us remember only too well.
