The 1995 movie Apollo 13 is about the ill-fated NASA mission that saw an explosion aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft cause the mission’s goal of landing on the moon to be aborted. As the NASA crew back home realizes the severity of the dilemma that the astronauts aboard the ship are in, they start scrambling to figure out how to get the crew back home alive. The movie is a thriller in many senses of the word, and yet, it was all based on actual events that occurred in 1970.

During one of the extremely tense scenes when the crew is trying to figure out how to get the crew home without the normal amount of power that the ship usually has, Gene Kranz (played by Ed Harris), the leader of the crew at Mission Control, is struggling to figure out how they can pull this off. He says, “We never lost an American in space. We’re sure as hell not going to lose one on my watch. Failure is not an option.”

That line, “Failure is not an option,” became one of the most enduring, iconic lines of the movie, and in many ways in all of cinema. However, it became more than a great line in a great movie. It became a battle cry all across the country for all kinds of people in all kinds of situations.

The Role of Failure in Sport
Sport teams, coaches, and athletes latched onto the line in droves. No matter the sport, no matter the level, no matter the moment in which they found themselves, people were uttering this line as a rallying cry to work hard, do your best, and make sure that you have left no stone unturned and no ounce of sweat and blood in your quest for success.

It is certainly a great line, one that sparks so much power, emotion, and even chills. However, while I love the line and what it meant to the movie and to the mission (although Kranz admits he actually never said it), in many of the multitude of situations in which it has been uttered by thousands of people since then, I don’t believe it is the right mindset to have.

Certainly, when you are part of a crew tasked with keeping other people alive, your mindset MUST be that “failure is not an option.” But when you are trying to teach kids to be their best in the athletic arena, telling them that failure is not an option, is not only exaggerated hyperbole, but also just plain not true.
Yes, I get that you are trying to motivate your people to be the best they can be in a very important moment with regards to the outcome of this game or this championship. But when we consider the bigger picture, it just doesn’t compute.

Of course we want to win. Anyone who is involved in a competitive arena needs to have a spirit that says, “I will not fail in this endeavor.” However, at the same time, s/he has to recognize that failure IS an option, and a very real potential outcome of the endeavor. Any individual or team can fail in any given competition. There is always a chance that one will not win.

While saying that “failure is not an option” can be motivating to people to perform their best, it can also be crippling. It can put undue pressure upon people that had not felt such pressure before. This can lead to playing tight, nervous, fearfully, and not to lose. When players compete this way, it can lead to tentativeness and doubt, which can hamper performance.

Making Mistakes is Good
More importantly, the statement, “Failure is not an option,” shortchanges one of the greatest things about sports. Sports is a great arena to teach kids about failure, risk, and making mistakes. Sports show kids that failure is a part of life. It shows them that preparation to succeed and then performing in the way you have prepared are the keys to success. It shows them that even when you take care of those things, there is no guarantee of success.

However, it also shows them that failure is not permanent. It shows them that they must get back up after a failure. They must work hard to fix what led to the failure, and then they must try again. It shows that not only is failure an option, but it is a good option.

How are we ever going to grow, develop, and improve if we don’t fail? How will we ever push ourselves to become our best if we never get out of our success comfort zone? How will we ever know the elation of the success, if we have not had the despair of failure?

So when considering the statement, “Failure is not an option,” I want you to consider under what circumstances it is being uttered. If it is something as life-and-death as the Apollo 13 mission, go for it. Failure absolutely must not be an option in those instances.

But if we are talking about youth and school sporting events, not only is it an option, it should be a goal! No, of course I am not saying you should seek to lose your competitions. However, I am saying that you should seek to push yourself to the point where you may fail. You should seek to push the envelope in such a way that you know what failure is and where it exists, so that you do all that you can to create success and to NOT fail.
If you don’t push yourself to that limit of failure (and sometimes over the edge into failure), you will never truly know how far you can go. How do you look yourself in the mirror and say, “I tried my best,” if you don’t know what your best is? The only way to find out is to seek failure as an option.

One final note about this concept – neither failure nor success are final. There is always a new place to find each of them. They are part of an ever-changing landscape. Today I may fail in some attempt for a myriad of reasons. But tomorrow as I work on that failure and seek to overcome it and create success, I change the boundary for failure. By pushing on and working to overcome, I make the point where failure occurs be somewhere different than it was before. By going after failure and then attacking it with everything I have, I overcome that failure and push on to find the next one. But by doing so, I have also created a new level of success.
​
It is up to us to make the commitment to seek to find failure and success every time we decide to step into our competitive arenas. The more we seek them, the more we grow and develop. We then start to become all that we can be. It is in those moments when we start to overcome our failures and create our successes.
Yes, failure IS an option – a very good one for all of us to seek!

Last week the University of Louisville Head Men’s Basketball Coach Rick Pitino was put on unpaid leave after a “pay-for-play” type scandal involving a recruit, as well as recruits and assistant coaches at other schools and various other people. This is also the third major scandal to rock Pitino’s program in the last few years. 

While Pitino claims his innocence, as he has in each of the scandals involving his programs, I am not writing today to litigate that case, nor to get into the messy details of it, nor to argue his innocence or guilt. I am writing to talk about how disappointing it is when people you look up to fall short in any way, but especially with regards to their character and integrity. Perhaps, I feel this more personally than others as I spent 6 summers working for Coach Pitino in summer camps at the University of Kentucky.

Let me say right here that I am no saint. I have fallen short in life like anyone else. I am not proud of some of the transgressions I have committed in my life. I have talked about character and integrity to the young people I have taught and coached for my entire life, yet I had my moments where I did not live up to my own words. Sometimes, I did not even realize that what I was doing was not showing good integrity; other times I knew what I was doing was wrong.

Let me also add that it is not like I made a habit of displaying poor character and integrity. I was always a “good kid” who did the right things for the most part. Most people would say that, in general, I have been a good example of being a person of integrity. However, I had my moments where I slipped and fell short of being who I said I was and who I wanted to be. I would imagine most people in this world could probably say something similar about themselves. It is one of the human elements many of us deal with.

Fortunately, I have had a conscience to guide me through those moments. Each time I slipped, I looked in the mirror and asked myself who I was, who I wanted to be, and were my actions becoming of that person that I wanted to be? When the answer was “No,” I worked to change my behaviors and to then grow from them. While I continue to be a flawed human being, I am a better person today than I was twenty years ago. And I hope to be a better person twenty years into the future. That is how we should all be. Seeking to improve who we are as we go through life.

I have had my share of “heroes” throughout my life. As a child and even on into my young adulthood, I put these people on pedestals. For the most part, they each stayed on those pedestals through the years. They also each fell off the pedestals at times. Sometimes they were allowed to be placed back onto the pedestals, based on how they reacted to their falls from grace. Others were never allowed back up there. Rick Pitino will not be going back up onto his pedestal. He has also added to the little bit of cynicism that has crept into my life over the last twenty to thirty years that has made me more cautious about putting people on pedestals anymore.

It’s a shame, though. We need our heroes. They help us see that there is good in our world, something to strive for, to aspire to be. I want my children and grandchildren to have people to look up to. I want them to be able to say, “I want to be like him.” “I want to act like she does.” I also want to still be able to feel that way myself. But with each Rick Pitino that falls off a pedestal, it becomes harder and harder to find those heroes.

That is why it so critical that we in the teaching and coaching and parenting world do all that we can to be the positive leaders and models that we can be for young people. We need to be examples of a life of character and integrity. We need to show people that there is good, there is hope, there is a right way to do things.

Yes, like anyone else, we will fall short at times. After all, we are all still human. But we must do all that we can to be the best role models we can be. There are so many people watching us. More importantly, there are so many people taking their cues from us on how to live their own lives. We must constantly ask ourselves, “Is my behavior exemplary? Am I doing something that I want the young people looking up to me to do? Is this the person that I want to be and that I want to be known as?”

While the answers to those questions are the most important ones we will ever utter, whether aloud or just to ourselves, the key is whether or not our actions will exemplify or defy those answers. By living a life of integrity and of example for all those who are watching you, you will be your best while helping them learn how to be their best.

**Author’s Note**  While the word “hero” gets thrown around a lot and many of you will say that Pitino was never a hero in the first place, my point in using that term was that he is someone that I (and many others) have looked up to over the years. So I say that someone like that has been a “hero” of mine because of the impact he has had on me as a coach and a leader. 
​
I realize that there is not much that he has done to be considered a true hero. We have heard so many stories of true heroes who stepped up and saved lives in Las Vegas this past week, as well as the storm-ravaged communities in Texas, Florida, and the Caribbean over the last months. I would never want to equate the true heroism these people have shown with the role and the actions of a college basketball coach. Yet, the way many people look up to our coaches and leaders in our lives, “hero” is one way that they sometimes get described. I hope you understand my meaning when using that word to describe Pitino.