Week Four: Dealing with Disappointment - Game Cancelled

This week was a little unusual. Our games were cancelled because of the weather.

Not rain. Not snow. Heat.

We play at night, and it’s October, but temperatures were still around 100 degrees for the early games. The league made the decision to cancel the entire night and, hopefully, reschedule the games later.

No big deal, right? We’ll just get ready for next week.

Not quite.

Kids Build Up to Game Day

Football is an emotional game. And one thing we know about kids is that they’re still learning how to understand and control those emotions. Most players spend the entire week building toward game day.

They’re excited. They’re nervous. They’re thinking about who they’re playing, what position they’ll be at, whether they’ll score, whether they’ll make a big play, and whether the team will win.

Then, suddenly, there is no game.

That can be a much bigger letdown than adults sometimes realize, especially when the cancellation happens at the last minute. All of that emotional energy has nowhere to go.

This Will Happen

If you coach long enough, games will get cancelled. Weather. Field conflicts. Scheduling problems. Air quality. Unexpected events. Sometimes you’ll know days ahead of time. Sometimes you’ll find out a few hours before kickoff.

Either way, part of your job as the coach is helping the team reset.

You don’t want the cancellation to turn into a flat week of practice and then carry into the next game. Your goal is to get the team’s energy level back to where it would have been if they had played.

Make the Next Practice Different

After a cancelled game, I like the idea of making the next practice especially high energy. Not necessarily harder. More competitive.

Turn ordinary drills into competitions. Keep score. Break the team into groups. Create races. Make players earn points. Let them celebrate wins.

Give them reasons to talk, compete, and encourage each other.

You’re trying to recreate some of the emotion they missed when the game disappeared from the schedule. That doesn’t mean abandoning fundamentals. You can work on exactly the same skills you normally would. Just change the environment around them. Instead of five minutes of a normal flag-pulling drill, make it a competition between two groups. Instead of routine agility work, make it a relay. Instead of walking through assignments, create a challenge where the group has to execute perfectly several times in a row.

The work still gets done. But the energy changes.

Energy Matters

Players perform better when they’re engaged. That doesn’t mean they need to be screaming and bouncing off the walls every practice.

But they should want to be there. They should be excited to compete.

And after the disappointment of losing a game they had been looking forward to, sometimes the coach needs to deliberately bring that excitement back.

You can’t control the weather.

You can’t control when a league cancels a game.

But you can control what your team feels the next time they step onto the field.

Bring the energy back. Then get ready for the next one.