Luck

This week, I’ve been running a summer soccer camp for large group of kids ages 7–11. I do deliver soccer programs throughout the year — it’s my side hustle. And while the usual focus is the blatantly obvious development of soccer skills, starting this little venture gave me the opportunity to do things with the kids that aren’t being done in other soccer programs (probably even other sports as well).

For example, at the camp this week, we’d spent as much time discussing and working on the topic of chance as we had on improving soccer skills. Call it luck or fate or whatever you want to call it but I think a topic like chance is more important than soccer skills because it will be something the kids experience both on the soccer field as well as off the field in so many other areas of their lives.

And as I want to ensure that we raise the bar here in PEI, I figure that a better understanding of this topic is a good way to help our future generation maintain high standards throughout the failures they will inevitably and regularly experience. I say this because, like I wrote about last week, failure is something that can cause us great pain. And like most pain, we do our best to avoid it. In turn, we don’t try as much and standards stay at their default setting.

So at the soccer camp, to talk about chance, I had lots of swag and merchandise for the kids to earn by drawing for it. I wrote the name of each prize on a slip of paper and but them in a bag. I put in a few slips with ‘pick again’ and I put in a bunch that were blank. The focus of the camp was not to compete with each other but to work together to be kind, caring and inclusive of each other. As players showed through their actions and words that they were being kind and caring, they got the opportunity to draw for a prize from the bag.

And over the course of the first two days, players watched as both highly coveted and less highly coveted prizes were drawn. There certainly was some envy towards those that drew the more sought after merchandise. However, the most emotion came when a player got a blank and therefore got no prize at all. In fact, there were a couple players who drew a ‘pick a gain’ and then followed that with a blank.

I think it’s fair to say that at events like this, most kids are given the exact same things. That’s what’s common and so that’s what they expect. That’s not how this soccer camp started off though. And yet, it gave the perfect setting to discuss the role of chance in our lives.

While every player that got to draw for a prize was nominated because of their kind and caring actions, they didn’t all get something or something they really wanted to get. And to me, that’s a big life lesson to learn as soon as possible so that you can better handle those sorts of ups and downs later on.

We talked about how being a good soccer player or a good person wasn’t always enough to earn you a good outcome — that sometimes you could do everything really well and still fail. Subsequently, you could also do less than your best and succeed at getting what you wanted, in turn possibly crediting yourself with a higher ability level than you actually have.

We also talked about how random luck can be — that you can get on a roll of good luck or bad luck over the short-term. We played a game called ‘Heads and Tails Tag’ to demonstrate that randomness. I’d flip a coin between two competing players, one player was heads and the other tails, and whichever side the coin landed on, that player had to run from the other player to avoid getting tagged.

I could then talk to them about how there were runs of heads or tails, making it seem like there was a pattern and that it was always heads and never tails, for example. I got to talk to them about a little experiment I did. The day before playing that game, I flipped the coin we used 100 times. There were runs and therefore changes in the lead of which side turned up but in the end it was 56 to 44 for tails. I asked them what would happen if I flipped it another 100 times and they figured that the score would continue to get closer to 50–50. This gave the kids the opportunity to see that you can’t make a definitive judgment off of just a few tries at something. Being able to do something the first time you try it, doesn’t mean you’re skilled and not being able to do something the first time doesn’t mean you’re not skilled.

And as the week went on and more and more slips of paper came out of the bag, I’d update the list of what was still left in the bag and they could see how the odds of winning a prize changed. We could then relate all these lessons to the games we played in the camp as we looked at the various actions and results and tried to determine how much was the impact of luck and how much was a result of skill.

At the end of the week, I asked each camper what they liked about the camp and what they learned. Unfortunately, the topic of chance was only mentioned once in answering the question what did they learn. Feels like a fail but hoping that one day it sinks in and they use that knowledge to help them navigate the world thriving on challenge.

Note: By the end of the week every camper had a t-shirt, a wrist band and a variety of other merchandise. Not everyone had one of everything available but everyone had at least a few things.