Coming Up Short
Story by Brian Valencia and Isaac Hinson | Design by Rody Farr | Photos by Sandra Rivera
The bleachers are full, there’s five seconds on the shot clock. Hitting this shot is what every kid with sports aspirations dreams of. The emotion, the happiness, the satisfaction. Now turn that on its head. The emotion, the sadness, the dissatisfaction. Every athlete understands the risk of coming to play, they know they’ll have to deal with the possibility of losing big games.
But how do they feel in the moment? What’s next for athletes in these heartbreaking scenarios?
GREAT LESSONS
Sports, in general, teach athletes great lessons. Losing is a natural part of the game. "You're never as good as you think you are, and you're never as bad as you think you are," says CWU's Head of Men's Basketball Coach Brandon Rinta.
Coaching a team by keeping them kneeled is an essential part of the job. Reminding and allowing athletes to mourn and celebrate teaches valuable lessons that others sitting in the stands don't always get to see. Lessons like these help them grow into strong, successful athletes. Those who play high-level sports get to learn how to deal with failure.
Each sport has its ways of dealing with losses. CWU's Head Football Coach and Offensive Line, Christopher Fisk, teaches his players the ‘Rule of 24’.
This rule allows individual players 24 hours to do whatever they do after a loss: pout, cry, complain or shout. This helps them get everything out of their system before jumping back into another game.
Either way, coaches of different sports remind their players that losing happens; the world isn't burning around you.
Different seasons bring together different players. "Teams and players that understand how to deal with failure in a positive manner, those can be the best teams," Rinta says.
The bigger the loss, the bigger the lesson. Former pole-vaulter and Athletics Photography and Digital Media Graduate Assistant Jacob Thompson has seen the top of the world, and what lies below as well.
“When I first got here, I had really high expectations for myself,” says Thompson. “I always had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder.”
After a lack-luster Freshman campaign according to Thompson, and a shortened Sophomore run due to COVID-19, Thompson was ready to show everyone what he could do in his Junior year. “My freshman year, I barely got mentioned in the recaps. You don’t want to mention the guys who have bad performances,” Thompson says.
“But when they started mentioning my name more, I was like ‘Okay, maybe I want to keep myself in these recaps. I want to make sure I keep performing really well. And I want to make sure they have something good to write about,’ I felt that pressure.”
Thompson did indeed have a successful Junior year, he finished second in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference (GNAC) for pole-vaulting, and had high expectations both internally and externally going into the final meet of the season.
“So going into the championship meet they had a write-up in our preview where it’s like ‘He’s second in the conference, he should score good points,’ I think I let that get to me.” Thompson says. “I ended up finishing eighth. That was probably the most heart-breaking [loss] I had.”
Thompson says he felt pressure going into the championship meet. He had seen himself in all the previews and game programs leading up to the meet and felt like he needed to show up and prove them right. He cleared his first two bars of the event easily, and thought the third would be just as easy, given he had cleared it earlier in the season.
He missed the bar on all three attempts.
“When I had my last attempt, I missed and knocked the bar off, and I just sat for a little while like ‘Fuck. Did that really just happen?’” Thompson says with a face full of solemnity. “I was supposed to be so much better than that. I was mad. It took me a minute. I finally came off the pit and I just sat on the side. I didn’t really want to talk to anybody. I didn’t want to interact with anybody. That was just a ton of disappointment.”
Thompson had implemented visualization into his routine. He would imagine himself on top of the podium, or as the first name on the post-game recap. Seeing neither of those come to fruition hit Thompson hard and made him feel terrible.
But, with the loss came an important lesson for Thompson, he re-learned to love the sport.
“Senior year was good,” Thompson says. “It was different because I kind of re-evaluated and I made the shift from putting a lot of pressure on myself to like ‘Let’s have fun.’ I doubled down on that. I said ‘It’s my last year, I have nothing to lose’”
This self-reevaluation proved successful. “People saw me [lose],” Thompson says. “People were disappointed I went from second place to eighth. So, senior year actually was my best year. I did good all year, made it to GNACs and ended up winning.”
FOCUSING ON WHAT'S NEXT
After a loss, it's easy to have your emotions on your sleeve. For football, the day after is sometimes the most painful.
Watching film the next day allows teams to catch mistakes and learn where they went wrong. "You really get to stare in the mirror where maybe immediately after the game, you don't always know all the reasons why you lost the football game," says Fisk.
This is the side of the game that fans don't get to see. Coaches get to watch plays where they made the wrong call, the same way players get to see the plays they made the wrong decision. Watching film over is something no one in a team can run away from.
Getting out on the court or field is one of the best ways players and coaches move on. Having practice helps everyone improve areas of struggle. Playing the next game helps everyone keep their minds on a new opponent. After a loss, invested teams will have the quietest locker rooms, and bus rides home. It's how they respond that can determine a season.
But what about when what’s next is meeting the same team again? Not only that, but when the result is still the same? Junior psychology major Tessa Hann and the CWU women’s rugby team have lost five straight games against Life University, with three of those losses coming in the playoffs.
“It's definitely hard,” says Hann. “It just seems like you’re not progressing. It's hard to look at it as a bigger picture… Everyone’s going through the same struggles and the same feeling like ‘Why can’t we beat this team?’”
After continuous losses, Hann says that you begin to develop a subconscious mental block because of the name of the team. You’ll believe you can beat the team going into the night, and come out with the same result as last time. And the time before that.
Hann has one more season to try and reach the ultimate goal of a championship before graduating. But she’s looking at things from a brighter side. If she can’t make it happen, that just opens the door for a new group of players to carry the torch.
“It’s something that I think about,” Hann says. “I mean, this program… We’re always growing. We’re always bringing people in. If that perfect team happens or doesn’t happen next year… I have hopes for the incoming class. Obviously I might be a little upset if it doesn’t happen, but I have a lot of hope for this program.”
THE ULTIMATE LOSS
Coaches and players at all levels will all tell you the same thing: Win or lose, it’s just a game. That is true, it is just a game. However, if you truly love the game, there will always be a loss waiting for any athlete, the loss of being able to play the game.
It comes for every athlete, either the end of high school, the end of college or the end of their professional careers. There’s always an end. For many athletes, they look at their final game as a conclusion. The final chapter.
Thompson remembers his final meet as a part of the CWU Track & Field team with feelings of satisfaction, as well as remiss. Both because of his performance, and the circumstances surrounding it.
“A lot of things fell into place that normally didn’t happen. It was the first championship meet that Central had hosted since 2005,” Thompson says. “I made all of my bars on the first attempt, which never happens. I started talking to my teammates and I’m like ‘The fuck is going on?’ and they’re like ‘I don’t know but keep doing it!’ and it ended off with me jumping a PR. It was a crazy feeling, and I was riding that high like the rest of the day.”
But, as the days passed and the reality set in, Thompson began to look at the things a little differently.
“After the meet is done, we do our team awards and I sat around and looked at the team and I’m like ‘Yup, that was it. That was the last time.’ That was when it took me back a little bit,” Thompson says. “Later that month we did senior pictures, and we came up to the track and I kind of just stood around and walked and thought ‘I’m never gonna jump here again’. It was done.”
“But I took all the good and the bad and I loved it. I felt super shitty feelings when I got lost, I felt disappointed, and I ended on a really high note… At the end I felt content. I just felt good.”