Issue #109
by Wayne Ellis, Sports America

Why Do Cheaters Cheat?
What You Can Do Today To Help Young Athletes Fight the Temptation to Break the Rules

It’s almost impossible today to tune in ESPN, listen to sports radio or pick up a sports publication that isn’t covering a story about cheating… or suspected cheating.

From blood doping in cycling… To steroid/HGH use in… (well you pick the sport)….To referees illegally influencing basketball games…

The world of sports seems riddled with players, officials or coaches who are willing to do almost anything to get ahead. 

Or maybe sports coverage is simply more pervasive, meaning more instances of cheating are making news.  Whatever the cause, stories about athletes breaking the rules, and even laws, surround us.

Unfortunately, sports may never be rid of cheaters, no matter how many rules or tests are instigated.   

Why?  Because people cheat based on the same motivations that make them strive to be the best they can be in sports.  It’s just that with cheaters, that motivation becomes obsession and overcomes common sense or sense of fair play. 

So, unless we make sure that today’s young athletes learn to value sports themselves, the effort they put into those sports and competition itself, rather than winning at all costs, we’ll only be setting the stage for another generation of cheaters.

Helping Children Overcome the Desire to Cheat

To make sure we do our part as parents, coaches and adults, we have to take action ourselves. We need to help our children learn to compete without wanting to cheat.  And we do that by recognizing why kids and athletes cheat, then reinforcing the behavior that replaces the need to cheat. 

Basically, the urge to cheat, the ones we can help guard against anyway, can be boiled down to three categories: 

1. Winning at All Costs
2. The Need for Attention
3. A Lack of Self Confidence

Winning at All Cost

For some athletes, the thought of doing their best in competition isn’t enough.  They have to win at all costs.  We could call these people, the anti-Woodens, for just as legendary coach John Wooden never urged his team to win at all costs – rather asking them to do their best when their best was needed – these people are all-consumed with winning. 

It’s as if they’re lives are defined by a win-loss record.  For them, it’s a short jump to doing whatever it takes to win – the end justifies the means.  Whether this entails bending the laws of physics through steroids, or the rules of the game through cheating, as long as the end result is a victory, they’ll continue along the same path.

To guard against this with children athletes, make sure they know that doing their best is enough.  Encourage fair play and giving their all every time.

Sure, kids have a competitive nature, but don’t let winning become the end-all, be-all.  Make sure they know that poor sportsmanship isn’t tolerated.  It’s never okay to taunt the losing team after a victory, or throw a fit or make excuses after  a loss.  In fact, if you can help a child understand that they can learn to play better from a loss, then you help to take some of the sting out of it. 

As long as the child-athlete understands that every game involves winners and losers, and that neither affects how you or the rest of the world sees them, you’ve done your job. That’s because you’ll have helped them form the foundation to protect against the all-consuming need to win… and more importantly the need to cheat to win. 

The Need for Attention

Closely associated with winning at all costs, is the need for attention.  Who doesn’t want to hang around a winner?  Well, don’t let that be your child athlete’s motivating force for sports.  You never know how that may affect them down the road.  For example…

A number of different sources have said that Barry Bonds first dipped into the world of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs because he was jealous of the attention heaped upon Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa during their homerun race in 1998. 

Feeling that the glory those two received should have been his own, Bonds became obsessed with breaking the home run record.  And because he assumed that both McGuire and Sosa were on steroids, he thought he’d level the playing field – that is cheat at their level. 

Bonds needed fans to see him as the best player, period, even if it meant changing his body through performance enhancing drugs. 

Again, wanting to be the best shouldn’t be discouraged.  But make sure that your child understands that there’s a difference between attaining that goal through playing by the rules and cheating to get around them. 

Perhaps more importantly, make sure your child knows they’re valued for who they are, and the effort the put forth when playing, not whether they win or lose. 

And parents, coaches or teachers, it’s up to us to make sure that we don’t  overlook the average or below average players, in favor of heaping praise on the more talented ones.  In that way, we’ll only be feeding into the “look at me” syndrome.

A Lack of Self Confidence

Some athletes feel like they need to manufacture an edge because their skills alone aren’t enough to create that edge for them.  For these athletes, cheating offers a way to make up for the notion of inadequacy. 

For children, this can become apparent if they’re physically different than the kids who are more successful at a sport.  If they’re shorter, slower, or heavier, kids can sometimes think they have to resort to underhandedness to level the playing field.  And if this helps them succeed early on, then it’s only reinforcing the need to cheat. 

Again, the key to offsetting this desire is to making sure each child athlete knows that they can excel and still be a valuable part of a team by making use of their strengths.  Help them to identify what they do best, and how that can help the team, or help themselves in sports.  In that way, they won’t feel inadequate or lack the self confidence to compete without cheating.

Start Young… To Stop Cheaters

Because the motivations for excelling in sports are so closely aligned to the reasons why athletes cheat, the best hope we have of reducing the number of cheaters in sports is to make sure the next generation of athletes don’t feel the need to cheat.

This doesn’t mean that we need to weed out competition in children’s athletics.  It just means that we have play a more active role in helping kids to enjoy their performance and understand that success comes in many forms – not just from winning.  

As parents, coaches, adults and teachers, if we pay attention to how our kids play the games, and how we’re helping them to value the sports experience, we’ll have created a strong foundation for helping them resist the urge to cheat.

Post Game HIGHLIGHTS

To learn from the master of making sure that athletes play for the right reasons, pick up any of Coach John Wooden and Steve Jamison’s books.  In them, you’ll learn about Coach Wooden’s definition of success, and how winning is never mentioned, and you’ll learn how you can help get the best efforts out of your kids, players and yourselves.

These books include: The Essential Woodon, Wooden on Leadership and Wooden: A Lifetime of Reflections and Observations. Click here’s to Amazon.

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