Today was soccer day. If you’ve never taken the chance to watch first graders play soccer, really, treat yourself to the experience.

I coach my kid’s team, and one of the players did a bang up as a defender, interrupting the opposing team’s plays. Or what passed for plays, since it was first-grade soccer. Seriously delightful.

This player was not happy having been a defender, and he said quite forcefully, “Defense is nothing!”

Me: What do you mean? You stopped a whole bunch of goals.

Him: The goalie would have stopped them anyway.

And that’s the point.

Every goal starts with first being something that the goal had to worry about. If the goalie never has to worry about the ball, then there are no goals.

I’ll take the defenders breaking up a play over the goalie making a save every single day of the week, and twice on Saturdays.

Does your system incentivize the folks who can jump in and make the save or the ones who make it so the save doesn’t have to be made?

I told the kid that he did his job today and helped his team. Time will tell if that was satisfying.

(Photo by Lars Bo Nielsen on Unsplash)