Friday Night Lights: The Lessons Beyond the Score

High school sports are about more than the score.

Friday night, John Adams football lost.

And yeah, if you just look at the numbers, there are reasons to feel pretty good about where this team is headed. A year ago, the same matchup looked very different. This year, our defense faced an incredibly strong running attack and played hard all night.

That's improvement.

But the stats don't really tell the story of Friday night. And wins and losses don't tell the whole story of high school sports.

Youth athletics aren't just about learning how to run a play, follow a route, catch a football or make a tackle. Those are the mechanics of the game. The more important lessons are everything that comes with them—the skills you need for the rest of your life.

You learn to be on time.
You learn to be accountable.
You learn to practice how you want to perform.

You learn how to depend on someone else and how to let someone else depend on you. You learn how to respond when things aren't going your way. You learn how to lose. You learn how to win—with humility and sportsmanship.

People sometimes call these "soft skills." I've never liked that term.

These are the real skills. They are the things that will ultimately determine whether many of these young people are successful long after nobody remembers the score of a high school football game. That's why something else from Friday night stuck with me. We knew our opponent would be tough. I'd seen the stats. I'd read the reports. There were some phenomenal young athletes on that field.

What surprised me won't show up in a box score. Sportsmanship.

I expected it from our guys because I've watched our coaches teach it. We shake hands. We take a knee when someone is hurt. Guys help opponents up. We encourage teammates whether we're winning or losing.

That's not accidental. Those behaviors are taught.

Unfortunately, so are the opposite behaviors.

Friday night, I watched things from the opposing team that bothered me far more than losing the game. I watched what I believed were unnecessary shots after plays. I watched holding away from the ball. I watched a much larger player appear to throw a punch at one of our players and get away with it.

But one moment bothered me most.

One of our players went down after a hard hit and didn't immediately get back up. From where I was standing, it looked like the kind of hit that at least deserved serious scrutiny from the officials. While our player remained on the ground, several opposing players celebrated the hit, high-fived each other and headed toward their sideline.

I couldn't tell from where I was standing what happened when they reached the sideline or how the coaches responded. But I could see what happened next: no one took a knee, even as it became clear that our player wasn't getting up right away.

Maybe some people see that and say, "That's football." I don't.

Football is physical. Football is honestly violent. Players are supposed to hit hard. They're supposed to compete. They're supposed to want to dominate the person across from them between the whistles. But when the whistle blows and another 15-, 16- or 17-year-old kid is lying on the ground, the competition stops for a moment.

That's somebody's son. It could have been mine.

Young people learn from the adults around them. Coaches aren't simply teaching blocking schemes and defensive assignments. Parents aren't simply cheering from the stands. Every adult involved in youth sports is helping teach young people what behaviors get rewarded and what behaviors don't.

We teach them whether winning excuses bad behavior.
We teach them whether taking advantage of someone because you can is acceptable.
We teach them whether empathy is weakness.
We teach them whether character matters only when it's convenient.

Those lessons don't stay underneath the Friday night lights.

Eventually these young men will leave high school. Most won't play college football. Almost none will play professionally. They'll become employees, bosses, husbands, fathers, neighbors and members of their communities. They'll carry the lessons they learned playing sports with them.

I walked away Friday night disappointed in the score, but proud of our guys.

I watched them compete. I watched them get knocked down and get back up. I watched them continue playing when the game was essentially over. Their opponent kept pushing. Even on fourth downs, they went for it, and even though another score wouldn't have changed the outcome, our guys refused to give up. 

I watched them do it without abandoning their standards.

A year from now, few people will remember the score.

Ten years from now, almost nobody will.

But the young men on that field will still be carrying those lessons.

Those "soft skills" will be valued on the shop floor and in the lab. They'll help some of these young men become leaders in the boardroom. They'll help determine who people trust, who they want on their team and who they want leading it.

And I suspect those young men will someday find themselves supervising people who learned different lessons, people who learned to cheat when they could get away with it, to ignore the rules when they became inconvenient, or that the score mattered more than how they got there.

Because eventually there isn't a scoreboard.

There is just who you became.

That's the part of Friday Night Lights that actually matters.