Are sports a pass-fail proposition? Local coaches, just like Giannis Antetokounmpo, don't think so

Sam Albert has experienced his fair share of wins and losses after 28 years coaching football.

However, it might come as a surprise to learn that for Albert, who enters his seventh season at Kiski Area this fall, determining a successful year vs. one he deems substandard does not have a perfect correlation to the win-loss column.

“I’ve had years where I was 12-0 and other years when I was 4-6, and that 4-6 year was just a great year, coaching-wise,” Albert said. “It’s got past the wins and losses for me. It’s about the bonds and relationships that you make with your players, and that’s a lifetime thing.”

To be sure, winning is satisfying, and Albert in 2021 notched career victory No. 150 in a Kiski Area win over Shaler.

But Albert is a believer that hyper-focusing on wins and losses can obscure the true impact sports make in the everyday lives of its participants, especially boys and girls at the high school level.

“We tend to forget everything else, all the lessons learned, the camaraderie and how it’s bigger than you and you’re part of something,” he said. “Those are all important lessons.”

Milwaukee Bucks star forward Giannis Antetokounmpo agreed and made world-wide headlines, with his comments on the subject late last month.

After the No. 1-seeded Bucks lost to No. 8 Miami in five games in the first round of the NBA playoffs, Antetokounmpo provided an introspective response when asked by a reporter if he deemed the season a failure.

“There’s no failure in sports,” he said. “There’s good days, bad days. Some days you are able to be successful. Some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn. Some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about. You don’t always win. … It’s as simple as that.

“Next year, we’re going to be better, try to build good habits, try to play better and not have a 10-day stretch where we play bad basketball, and, hopefully, we can win a championship.”

Antetokounmpo’s remarks have attracted a wave of follow-up dialogue from fellow players, coaches and armchair commentators across professional, collegiate and amateur sports.

To some, the 28-year-old’s response seemed like a convenient deflection, given Milwaukee’s failure to advance as the top-seeded team in the playoffs.

But for others, Antetokounmpo struck a chord.

“I saw his comments, and I thought they were, obviously, very thoughtful,” Robert Morris men’s basketball coach Andy Toole said. “I think what he was getting at is every season that you start, you have your ultimate goal in mind. For us, it’s a conference championship and the NCAA Tournament. For him, it’s an NBA championship. But those things are really hard to attain. A lot of guys go through their entire careers and might only touch those things one time, some never.

“I think to categorize every season that doesn’t end in a championship as a failure would be missing the entire point of the whole exercise of sport. Because there is so much to learn each year. There’s so many things outside of the wins and losses that can be applicable to everything we do throughout our daily lives.”

Toole, as Antetokounmpo did later in his response, noted that Milwaukee’s last title came in 1971, five years before the NBA-ABA merger, with a team featuring Kareem Abdul-Jabaar and Oscar Robertson, which raises the thought-provoking question: Should the last 50 years of the Bucks’ organizational history be deemed a failure?

“I think failure is such a strong word, and that’s part of (Antetokounmpo’s) rebuttal,” Bishop Canevin football coach Rich Johnson said. “They made it that far. They’ve had a lot of success. That organization is moving in the right direction and still is one of the top teams in the NBA. Disappointment, letdown, something like that I can kind of get.

“ … But to say they failed, you’re still one of the top teams in the league. Before Giannis even got there, who even really (cared) about the Bucks?”

Greensburg Salem girls basketball coach Rick Klimchock had a similar conclusion to Antetokounmpo after the Golden Lions’ season came to an end against Belle Vernon in the opening round of the WPIAL playoffs.

The lack of a deep postseason run didn’t prevent Klimchock from reflecting on what his players gained over the course of the year.

“As I look back on our season, did all the girls have a positive attitude? Was our bench alive on all possessions? Was our culture good? When our game was over, did we pick up the water bottles and shake the opponents’ hands? Did we not get technical fouls? Were we respectful to the referees? Those are all yesses,” he said.

“So how do I say that that wasn’t a successful year?”

Without question, as athletes move from high school to college and then to the professional ranks, less latitude exists to judge a particular year by metrics other than wins and losses.

In comparing professional sports franchises — multi-billion-dollar enterprises — to collegiate and high school programs, expectations are vastly different, as is the ability to write off shortcomings.

After all, Milwaukee is now without a coach, with its front office having fired Mike Budenholzer, who led the Bucks to five straight first-place finishes atop the Central Division and was only two years removed from capturing an NBA title.

So what’s the verdict on success vs. failure in sports as well as the validity of Antetokounmpo’s remarks?

It might be best to say that it remains up for debate, depending on whom you ask.

“You can’t say, for whatever sport it is, if you’re not first, then it’s unsuccessful,” Moon wrestling coach Mike Muraco said. “There’s so many other things at play.

“… You’re trying to make sure the athletes are doing well, performing and improving and, hopefully, learning something much bigger than the sport along the way.”

Whether it’s the Bucks or Bishop Canevin, falling short is to be expected across all sports.

But rigidly defining failure might be an exercise that contains limited benefits.

“Everybody’s going to fail at some point in time,” Duquesne football coach Jerry Schmitt said. “But if you don’t learn from it, that’s the real failure.”