Legendary softball coach Sue Enquist has 887 career wins and 11 national championships for a reason. Not only is she a genius in the dugout and on the softball diamond, but she is perhaps more advanced when it comes to team-building and character development. Coach Enquist learned that an extra 400 swings in practice meant nothing compared to using that time on character building. By choosing to invest in the people she was coaching, Coach Enquist left a true impact in the lives of many.
Of all of the amazing lessons Coach Enquist taught her many players who came through her program at UCLA, nothing is more amazing to me than how she taught her athletes to fail. Yes, you read that right—she actually taught her athletes how to fail—and they even practiced it on a weekly basis!
Failure is what ultimately teaches us to be confident, even in our most stressful moments. At some point, every coach and athlete will face a moment where all the pressure feels like it’s landed on them, and them alone. How would you handle that moment? What would you do when it feels like everyone is rooting against you? Do you live up to the moment, or do you fall victim to it?
I believe that the only way we will know how to handle failure is by experiencing it. We will never know how to get back up if we never get knocked down in the first place. If a baby who is learning to walk never falls, how will they learn to be balanced? You need to fail in order to succeed.
So, how do you practice failing? Coach Enquist made it very simple. She set up situations in practice where it was hard for her team to succeed. And then when they failed, she taught them how to handle it. She did this by having all her players participate in a “Failure Recovery System” (FRS), a routine that her players would complete every single time they failed.
Here’s an example: Hit ground balls to your infielders and have a coach sit on a bucket at first. That coach is not allowed to move more than an arm’s length to catch the ball. If a perfect throw is not made, that player practices their FRS, which first involves physically acknowledging the mistake (i.e. tapping your chest), followed by an action showing you “moving on” (i.e. bending down and swiping the dirt as if you were wiping the slate clean). Their teammates then acknowledge with a simple point or head nod that we’ve taken individual accountability for a mistake and the entire team is moving on, not from the player who made the mistake, but with them instead.
This simple yet effective practice allows for the players to learn from firsthand experience how to be a better teammate as they rally around others when they make mistakes. Everyone will fail in sports, so instead of trying to deal with it reactively, why not practice it regularly?
To me, this is all so relevant because of the beauty of sports in the first place. Sports teaches life lessons, simply put. You may get laid off or fired one day, or mess something up at work, or have a fellow employee make a mistake. You can’t convince me a former athlete isn’t better equipped to handle these situations, just so long as their coaches have instilled these lessons. Teach your players the skills to be a good athlete, sure, but invest in the skills required to be a good human being!
Sue Enquist became UCLA’s first All-American as a player, helping the Bruins to their first softball national title in 1978. She was an assistant coach from 1980–88 and stayed on staff as co-head coach (1989–1996) and eventually head coach (1997–2006), bringing ten more national titles back to UCLA. Her .835 winning percentage is the highest recorded by any softball coach with 800+ wins, and she is a member of the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame, the National Fastpitch Coaches Association Hall of Fame, and the UCLA Hall of Fame, among others.