A little Moogic in the air helps, but so does a killer preseason schedule

Yeah, there must have been a bit of moogic in the air last night at Valencia High School. It was perhaps the big football league title matchup against Canyon High School. And since my son is on the Valencia team, there’s a little more than a game at stake, it’s bragging rights in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Valencia has been the champion in recent years, but they graduated a lot of veterans to the skill positions on offense, but they were returning a good chunk of defense. Canyon was back with the best skill players in the league.

Now during the summer in the passing leagues Cañón beat Valencia every time they played. And preseason polls by local sportswriters indicated that Canyon won the league championship based on returning players and summer performances.

Now, I can’t tell you much about the teams Canyon played before last night, but they came in undefeated and were second in the area. Valencia, meanwhile, was only 3-3. They had lost those 3 games to some perennial powerhouses, Notre Dame, Chaminade and the ever-mighty Loyola. These are private schools and are not restricted from only getting players who live in the school district. It was one of the toughest preseason schedules in the area. And as you’d expect from a young offense, they didn’t score many points. The defense kept them in the game.

So all the local writing had Canyon beating Valencia last night… but it didn’t happen. And the fun part was, for the outside fan, perhaps the easiest game of the year so far for Valencia, as they won 34-7. And it wasn’t even that close.

The moral of the story is one that we have seen many times throughout our lives. While you play every game to win, it doesn’t always happen. In Coach John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success, he discusses this very fact. He wanted his players to be prepared and to give their best effort in every match. The win usually took care of itself, but sometimes the referee could make a bad call, the ball could have a bad bounce. He could just not shoot well or the other team could have been better. It was all about the effort.

The other point I’d like to make is that all too often we see failure as just that: failure. But there is also a great opportunity to learn if you think of failure as simply not getting the result you wanted and figure out what you need to change to get the result you want. This is something I try to preach (although I’m not perfect and I must admit I have my fair share of faults here too) to our dental office team.

I hope the young men of the Valencia High soccer team remember the lessons they learned from losing together as a team…and then coming together as a team to not only win, but to outperform their great rival in every facet of the game. And I hope not. become overconfident and stop playing in the minor games that follow. And the league championship can be yours.

I must say that I am very proud of the way the youngsters have matured so far this season.