Moral Is A Lot Better When We Win

Ward envisioned Rainbow Soccer as a communal experience.  There were no tryouts.  Some teams did yoga as a warmup.  Games were supposed to be more for the fun than competition, so scores were only loosely monitored.  No team won-loss records were kept.  Dorrance ignored Ward's vision and trained his team to win.  He kept the game score in his head.  He tracked his own won-loss record.  One day Dorrance drove to a predominantly African-American neighborhood in town, recruited the best four black athletes he could find in the local park, and paid their league fees.  He placed his new players up the middle as his center back, center half, and two inside forwards, and the team jelled.  "Some of the other Rainbow coaches and parents told me I was taking the game too seriously," Dorrance says, "I told them, 'If winning doesn't matter to you, that's fine.  But we've discovered our morale's a lot better when we win.'  They didn't like that we buried everyone."

Pg 42-43 The Man Watching