We coaches take our games very seriously.

In my sport (soccer), one colleague had his players cross out the words "have fun," which were emblazoned on the back of the team's training shirts. Another coach purchased a set of the "Soccer is Life" shirts for each member of his team. Yet another likened the upcoming match as a cosmic battle between good and evil. "The way that team acts and the way that they play," he remarked, "they don't deserve anything good to happen to them."

Synecdoche. It's one of my favorite words. I like the way that it sounds but more importantly, I like what it means. Synecdoche means the part that represents the whole. In this story, it means one moment that represents all moments. For me, it will always be the moment that taught me the place that sport should play in society.

For over a decade, I had the privilege of coaching the best women's soccer team in the NAIA -- the Westmont College Warriors from Santa Barbara, California. Not only did we win four national championships in five years, but we regularly took on, and beat, quality Division I teams as well. Our favorite David and Goliath annual event was the cross-town rivalry between Westmont and the University of California, Santa Barbara. On 14 occasions, these two teams from two different divisions of the collegiate soccer world would square off, often with mesmerizing results. So it was with great sadness that we prepared for the game in 2001, for UCSB had announced that its conference would no longer allow it to schedule games against non-Division I opponents. After 14 years, our rivalry would come to an end.

As my team dressed for the night game, my assistant coach asked me what I truly thought of our chances, given that I had already scouted the Gauchos twice that year. "Not this year," I said. "They've been getting better every year, and I just don't think we can stop them defensively any-more."

I was right. In front of a crowd of 1,000 mostly Westmont partisan fans, UCSB scored and scored again. In fact, they scored four times, the most goals we had given up in a match in over five years. We couldn't stop them. But there was something that I didn't know before the match: They couldn't stop us, either.

In one of the most exciting collegiate games I have ever witnessed, Westmont won by a score of 6-4. The headline of the sports section in the next morning's paper screamed, "Westmont Wins Final Cross-Town Match." I couldn't wait to walk around our campus and hear the congratulatory remarks of the many students and staff who had attended the night before. I knew I would be invited to replay the game's highlights over and over again.

But it never happened. No one talked about the game that day. Why? Go back and take a closer look at that morning newspaper with the big "Westmont Wins" headline. Notice the date in the upper left hand corner: September 11, 2001.

By 8:46 a.m. that day, no one was talking about soccer games or rivalry matches. A country shattered by an unthinkable event tried to come to terms with one of the worst days in our nation's history.

I was reminded of a very important truth that day. Youth and collegiate sports are important -- they can teach us much about how to live lives of passion and excellence. But at the end of every day, we must never, ever forget that they are just what we call them -- a game. And they are meant to be fun. Win or lose, they are meant to allow us to escape, if only for a little while, from the reality that we live in a world that includes a full measure of pain and sorrow.

As I roam the sidelines either coaching my own team, or searching for the next great player, I'm afraid that we have forgotten that. Bad play on a soccer field is treated as if it were a botched battle in a real war. Coaches coach out of anger and intimidation. Acts of sport violence and abuse seem to be increasing at an alarming rate.

But it doesn't have to be this way. I left 23 years as classroom teacher/coach at the college level to accept the full-time coaching position at San Diego State. When I made my announcement that I was leaving Westmont after 13 years to focus exclusively on coaching, the No. 1 question I was asked was, "But how can you leave the teaching profession?" My answer was always the same, "I didn't -- I'm trading in the classroom for an even more dynamic learning environment."

I love the potential of the classroom, but for true life transformation, nothing compares to the potential of athletics competition as a vehicle for change. A few years back, a major study by the United Nations concluded that higher education was resulting in radical transformation of students only when there was the presence of "intense, unexpected shared emotional experience."

Is there any learning environment than can better provide such an experience? But the first lesson our student-athletes need to learn is that this isn't war, this isn't life and death. Only then can athletics competition weave it's true magic: to teach our student-athletes how to handle life's difficult situations when the stakes are relatively low.

So let's reserve our outbreaks of sorrow, rage and anger for those inevitable moments in life, such as the events on 9/11, that truly warrant such responses. Play hard, have fun and maybe, just maybe, sports can be that joyous learning tool that they were always meant to be.

Mike Giuliano is the head women's soccer coach at San Diego State University.