Measured in Wins and Losses

Coach Wright with U.S. U-18 player Arin Gilliland

by Josh Corman


I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
- Michael Jordan

My friends who played soccer for Kevin Wright at West Jessamine High School always gave me the impression that he was a sort of mad scientist: the most intense man in the world, obsessed with competition and conditioning to near sociopathic levels. Many times I detected ringing notes of resignation in their voices when they spoke about practices, where they would run around a quarter-mile track carrying bricks in each hand, push enormous tires up steep hills like so many exhausted Sisyphuses, and play maniac games of short-sided soccer - often with Coach Wright in the middle of the action, yelping wildly and knocking over any player who dared tangle with him.

This manic intensity manifested itself in a team slogan that displayed both the punishing quality of the work Coach Wright’s teams put into their preparations and the hardened pride that each player took in living through them: “Tough as Nails.” Coach Wright ensured that even if his players lost, they would never do so because of fatigue or a lack of toughness. Simply put, Kevin Wright hates to lose and demands the sort of fevered dedication from his players usually reserved for college football coaches in the south.

When I came back to West Jessamine as a substitute teacher, Coach Wright (who barely remembered me from my days as a student) and I quickly developed a friendly relationship founded on our respective sports fanaticism. When I subbed in the gym (a place where Coach Wright’s math classes often mysteriously find themselves), we had involved, animated discussions about pennant races, the BCS, the NCAA Tournament, and any other major sporting event we could cover.

Once, when Coach Wright requested me as a substitute, I passed the time students spent working by reading the dozens of old newspaper clippings he had laminated and hung behind and around his desk. The articles stretched from his playing days as Montgomery County’s goal keeper all the way to his tenure as West Jessamine’s girls’ soccer coach (he has coached the girls’ team since his daughter was a freshman in 2007). Many of the articles detail the sorts of exploits that a coach or player may want to remember forever, but just as many articles describe the sort of heartbreaking losses and shortcomings that most people wish they could excise from their memories altogether. Close losses to bitter rivals, poundings at the hands of highly-favored opponents, penalty shoot-out defeats in regional title games, and career-ending shock upsets are all displayed just as noticeably as the biggest successes of Coach Wright’s career.

This panorama, equal parts elation and misery, puzzled me. I’m used to hearing coaches and other motivational-types shouting about the power of positive thinking and exclaiming that the surest way to succeed in any field is by removing negativity, not dwelling on mistakes, and focusing on positive outcomes, and I guess I assumed that every coach had adopted those tenets. The flaw in this view is that by erasing failure from our memories, we lose the perspective necessary to properly appreciate success. Culturally, we come to believe that failure must be eradicated because it is painful, forgetting that failure, more assuredly than almost anything, leads us to a greater understanding of what it takes to improve ourselves.

Winning and losing are a part of sports, but it’s easy to forget that they’re a part of life, too. We need to understand that not everybody can succeed all the time, and when we fail, we need to remember what that feels like and what that failure taught us about ourselves. This is as true in government and education and business as it is in sports.

To Coach Wright, keeping these articles isn’t dwelling on negativity, it’s simple honesty - a fair sampling of the most meaningful moments of his career. His clippings - the good and the bad - are there because he wants to be reminded daily of his capabilities and his limitations, not because his wins and losses define him, but because he wants to get better, and he knows that wouldn’t happen if he didn’t pause to reflect on those sour moments of defeat as often as the sweetest moments of glory.

Last Thursday, I sat in the stands at Dunbar High School’s soccer complex, watching our girls’ team play in the state tournament semi-finals, the biggest game in our program’s history. Cold rain pelted the thousand or so spectators and bitter winds swirled through the bleachers’ cold metal skeleton as I watched West Jessamine fall in defeat to Notre Dame Academy, who would, two nights later, win the state championship. As the contest slipped away, I watched Coach Wright pace the sidelines, the frown evident on his face even from across the pitch. As sad as I was for the girls, many of whom I’ve taught, I knew that Coach Wright wouldn’t let them beat themselves up about it, and that as bad as it hurt in that moment, in ten years the ache of that defeat will be dwarfed by the profound sense of growth that comes from being a member of a tightly-knit team, suffering a hurtful loss together, and coming out stronger on the other side. I don’t know that I could say that if I didn’t know Coach Wright, if I didn’t know that on Friday morning, he bought a copy of the paper and started cutting.