Much has been written and said about the value of youth and high school sports to the growth and development of young men and women.

The value of being a part of a successful team as a young person cannot be overstated. When young people learn that hard work and dedication can lead to success on the athletic field, they can undoubtedly be taught that those same lessons can be applied in the real world. Hard work in school can lead to scholarships at the college level. Hard work in college can lead to the start of a successful career as an adult.

Dedication on the field can lead to an athletic scholarship, which leads some into the world of professional sports.

But what about the teams that don’t always win, what lessons can those kids learn? There can be only one champion in competition, so what do the second and third place finishers learn?

My high school football team won some big games back in the 1990s. We reached the third round of the Class 6A playoffs my junior year after winning our region.

My senior year we beat our biggest rival on a last-second field goal and we defeated a team full of Division 1 recruits on the road. Our coaches had installed a new zone spread offense that befuddled a lot of our opponents. We finished second in our region and set a couple school records on offense with two high-profile recruits ourselves. But the thing I remember most about my senior season was the loss in the first round of the playoffs.

AHSAA regions consisted of only four teams back then, and the runner up had to travel. So we traveled to play a school that had won what we thought was a weaker region than ours. We thought that since we came from the vaunted Birmingham metro area, where we thought we played against the state’s best competition every week, that we would win easily. No matter how hard our coaches pushed us in practice that week, no matter how many times they told us that other team was good, in the back of our minds we thought we had it.

Our expectations could not have been further from the truth. That “small town” team pushed us up and down the field and shut down our fancy new offense. They hurt us. They were bigger, stronger, faster and better prepared than we were. We might have taken them for granted, but they were dead serious about whooping our butts.

It was freezing cold that night, and the way they dominated us made the harsh cold that much more bitter.

We all learned a valuable lesson in that loss. The junior class used that loss as fuel to win a state championship the next season. My senior class learned to take every opportunity for success seriously, to not settle for what you have if you have a chance to get better.

For all the good memories that we made that season, the lesson learned from the worst loss is what most of us remember.

Eric Mann is Sports Coordinator for Gulf Coast Newspapers. Reach him at emann@gulfcoastnewspapers.com