The Competitive Spirit
Using Sports To Teach Kids The Skills of Lifelong Success
The greatest coaches in the world understand what winning truly is: a habit,
a mindset, and an expectation. Knowing how to win means knowing how to
prepare relentlessly for all foreseeable circumstances. It means striving for
perfection through mind-numbing repetition. It means knowing how to look
for solutions instead of excuses. And it means respecting the strengths of all
opposition while having the confidence to face them head-on anyway.
Let's stop pretending our responsibilities as parents, managers, and coaches
are less than they truly are. Teaching others the skill of winning is one of the
toughest jobs in the world, especially if you have little experience winning
yourself, but it's not impossible.
JD Kinimaka is a successful father of six wonderful children. Four girls and two boys that have all been successful not only in sports, but in life. JD was born in Kauai, Hawaii and raised in Manhattan Beach, California. JD's whole life was centered around sports since the day he could basically walked. He had been groomed by his father, Joseph, to be a football player. JD always knew that he would play professional football and his whole life revolved around that goal. He received a full ride football scholarship to a University in Kansas. This, however, was his first experience with adversity. He had always heard that he was the "best" and he would go on to play Professional Football and at the beginning of the season, he was doing great. The coach filled his ears with praise and told him how lucky their school was to have him. JD became complacent and overconfident and no longer fought to maintain his position on the team. JD went from being the best thing he had ever seen to constantly having the coach yell at him and no longer motivating him. That was JD's demise and could no longer take the negative reinforcement, he got burnt out and unmotivated. Motivation is a tricky thing, some kids respond differently to different kinds of motivation. JD was angry with the coach and quit the team and gave up his scholarship his senior year, forcing him to leave college without his degree. He moved back to Hawaii and got into real estate with his father. With the birth of his first child, his whole focus changed in life to raising successful happy kids. He threw himself in to putting them through sports, coaching their teams and coaching high school football as an as defensive coordinator. It was at the high school that JD shared some of the "winning strategies" that you will read in this book that he not only instilled in his own children, but also some of his high school football players that eventually went on to play in the NFL.