Team sports are big in schools, and it’s no wonder why. Of course, from an organisational and managerial perspective, offering team sports at school means you can involve more children than if you were doing individual sports. It’s also far more cost effective and there are lots of options for kids to choose from.

However, when it comes to the children themselves, playing team sports is far more beneficial for them than simply including everyone. Team sports teach children – and even adults if they continue when the leave school – many valuable lessons that they can take with them in life.

While playing in a soccer team, a netball team or any other kind of team is great for teaching children to work together and trust one another, it also teaches them how to both win and lose.

Here is why both winning and losing are important for children while growing up.

Why Winning is Important

Nobody can deny that winning feels good. Whether you’re playing rugby, running a race or playing darts, being the best feels great! But it’s about more than just knowing that you’re good at something and that you’ve outplayed your competitors.

There are a few important lessons that children can learn from winning while playing a team sport. First, you win as a team. Despite the fact that there may be one person who scored all the goals or hit the most sixes, the whole team contributed to the win.

Second, just because you’ve won something, doesn’t mean that you’re now the best in all the land that you cannot improve anymore. You may have won a specific competition or match, but there’s always room for improvement.

Third, kids must always remember that to have winners, there must be losers. Celebrating a win is perfectly fine, as long as you’re always respectful of other people and the fact that those who lost may not be feeling as happy.

Why Losing is Important

Losing isn’t anybody’s first choice, but sometimes, it’s just inevitable. While it may not feel very good and you may be unhappy about the outcome of a match, the way you react to losing says a lot about character.

In order to win, you must lose – it’s simply part of the game, and life more generally. For children, losing a match or a tournament while playing a team sport will show them that sometimes, you do lose – and it’s okay! The most important part is to try and learn where you went wrong and do things differently in future.

Most importantly, just as you win as a team, you lose as a team too. No single person is to blame, everybody participated. If you can teach your child to stay strong and stick with their team when they lose, they’re bound to succeed later on in life, whether while paying team sports or enjoying Cox Plate betting.

Finally, losing isn’t the end of the world! Children ought to be taught to take a loss as an opportunity to learn, move forward and do better next time.