Sing when you're winning

There's winning, and there's WINNING.

My season with the U15s girls has come to an end.

We got off to a rocky start. When they seemed uninterested in improving their fitness and unable to listen, I almost called it off.

“I just hate running, that’s all”, one of them said to me.

When I asked them what they liked about playing football, she said “Winning”.

The connection between winning and an inclination towards fitness was lost and I never seemed to make it clear.

To be fair to the player, I gave up half-way through the season. I gave up starting the training session with a lap around the oval. I focused on what they would do and tailored sessions around that.

They were happy to run if they were chasing the ball, or someone carrying it, so we worked on drills that had them run, without them realising. Like sneaking vegies into a toddler’s Bolognese sauce.

When asked to kick, to focus on technique and the target, they blazed away, losing control of their ankles as they swiped at the ball, dropping it from wherever their hands happened to be, rather than from where they’d been instructed.

Until we turned the drill into a competition. Then they hit the target.

We lost the first game. Then the next one. And another. Training attendance dropped. The task – to win – seemed too big, too much to digest. They could not see how to address it.

So we reminded them that football is game made up of small acts. Little efforts. Added together, those little efforts build something. All I want you to do, I said, is focus on the next effort. It’s small. Just run that bit further to put a player off their kick. Run towards her so she must go closer to the boundary line, further from the goal. When she kicks it out, the rest of you make sure you thank your teammate for her ‘little’ effort.

Things like this change momentum, I told them. It changes what might have been. Instead of the ball hurtling toward our exhausted backline, it is stalled, they can breathe, and we can think about moving the ball in the direction we want it to go.

They started making more small efforts. They started trying to put instructions into practice. They were thinking out there on the field.

We still didn’t win.

We kicked behinds and sometimes goals.

But we lost.

The last game was at our home ground. We were the last fixture of the day. Three girls were celebrating their birthday. I ordered 48 little cupcakes. Red velvet and vanilla. Red and white, the colours of our club.

Before the game I reminded them of the small efforts we were asking them to make. I pointed out that sometimes we think we have nothing left to give. Sometimes, we think, oh, I can’t run that bit further, I’m stuffed. I’m too tired. We always have more to give than we think, I said. Today, when you think you’re tired, try pushing a little bit more, you might find that you have something else.

When we keep going through a barrier we perceive in our mind, we learn about ourselves and what we can do. That’s how great things are made, I said. That’s how YOU make great things.

They looked sceptical, but they didn’t talk while I was talking.

I honestly thought we had a chance of winning that last game. We had run the opposition close last time. We just couldn’t score goals. We held them everywhere, but couldn’t make them pay.

But after two quarters, I knew the game had probably slipped away from us. They had kicked four or five goals, we had scored nothing. Not a point. We couldn’t seem to get the ball forward and hold it there long enough to exert pressure.

The other team kept kicking goals.

At three quarter time I knew the game was gone. I asked them to keep going. Remember what I said. I know you’re tired, but this is our last game. You can rest for weeks after that. Keep going. Just keep going.

They continued to make small efforts. The quarter seemed to slow down, then speed up. I wanted it to be all over, but I also didn’t want it to end.

With less than a minute to go, we received a 50m penalty. The ball was in the hands of a player who is generally relaxed and whose kicking had improved markedly over the season. I calculated that she could possibly kick a goal from where the umpire was going to direct her.

She ambled towards the mark until the team screamed at her to hurry up. The clock was ticking closer to zero. She had no idea. The substitutes on our bench, along with the three water carriers (an injured U13 helping out and two 11-year-old boys who take their jobs very seriously) ran down the boundary line, willing her on.

The player gave it all she had, it was a nicely shaped kick and I admired it as it came off her boot and made a mental note to congratulate her on her improvement with regard to it, but it fell short. The ball was brought to the ground, there was a melee and our smallest player toe-poked it over the line.

We scored a goal. A GOAL.

The siren went immediately.

The girls celebrated like they’d won the grand final. They screamed and jumped on each other and laughed and hugged.

We didn’t win. But we’d won something that they didn’t have at the beginning of the season. We’d won a team. We’d won a spirit that can’t be manufactured and I had no real idea how we had got to this point, but I was grinning and teary at the same time.

I gave my usual talk in the sheds after the game. For the first time this season, every single girl in our tiny, 14 player roster was there. Alongside them were three U13s who had played with us to make up numbers, as they did most weeks, and another who had had her teeth dislodged the previous week. She had run the water, her frustration at not being able to play palpable. She had prowled the line like a caged animal.  

The two 11-year-olds – my nephew and his best mate, whose sister plays in the team – and my 5-year-old niece, pulled chairs next to mine and listened as I talked. I had to hold things together. They all looked at me expectantly. I told them I was proud of them and admittedly I was getting teary. The captain spoke and everyone listened reverently, even the five-year-old. The injured U13 player leaned over and whispered to me: I think we should sing the song.

Sing the song. We had not sung the song all season. You only sing when you win.

When the captain finished, I told everyone about the suggestion. They jumped up and grabbed each other, tight in a circle.

I am not sure if the walls of that change room have withstood a louder rendition of that song.

Now, let’s go and eat some cupcakes, I said.

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