Bochicchio Sports Character Initiative

"Winning" in  every sense of the word.

The Bochicchio Sports Character Initiative believes that sporting competition is about winning. If you do not play to win, you do not really honor the game or your competitor.  You have to use every tactical and technical tool within reason, and within the spirit of the game, to try to prevail in the contest.  Any serious coach knows that, sooner or later, "posting a victory on the scoreboard" absolutely has to be an aim.

However, we believe that a coach can hardly be called a winner if this is the only  type of winning he achieves. Even if building a winning record is a necessary condition of real coaching excellence, it is very far from suffcient and is often times embarrassingly shallow.

Serious coaches want winning to reflect genuine excellence, not a cheap and cowardly illusion of success.  In this respect, there is much that a coach needs to win besides the game. The truly successful coach needs to win the respect of his team, win the trust of his colleagues, and, most importantly, win the personal war against the ever-present temptations that might cause a coach to compromise the spirit and dignity of the game in order to put a "W" into the book.

When a coach needs to tamper with the rules and encourage cheating, or when a coach needs to berate players and officials in order to win a game, then that coach has lost much, much more than he or she has won.  We wish to remind coaches that some of the most successful sports programs have won championship after championship by employing participant-centered, positive coaching philosophies which build remarkably competitve teams while instilling the ideals of moral character, sportsmanship, and integrity. And, most significantly, the research evidence increasingly suggests that these teams maintain their extraordinary records of success. not in spite of, but because of  their pursuit of these high ideals.