Entitled and deluded: Trump is a terrible role model for my teams. And a dangerous one.

The first high school basketball game I coached, back in the early 1990s, was a one-point win over the reigning league champion. I can still feel the euphoria seeing the buzzer-beating jumper shake the twine. Ten years later, I was at the funeral of the young man who’d made that shot. As his friends and former teammates and I consoled each other, I thought how trivial that first victory was compared to all the losses those young men and I had to get over during that season.

It wasn’t easy trying to teach myself and those young men to accept defeat with dignity and pride and respect for an opponent. At 15 and 16 and 17 years old, they had already lost so much in their lives. Some were in the foster system or living in some other guardian situation because of parental death, incarceration or drug addiction. Many had been in trouble of one kind or another, in school and on the streets. Some were at least marginally affiliated with gangs.

That old cliché about losing the game but winning the fight was always a viable option in their minds. These were not disciplined athletes. A few were good enough to play at one of the high-profile high school basketball programs in the city, but had been deemed “uncoachable.” Others, though quite talented, had previously participated in little or no organized athletics. For some, even the smallest failure pushed their emotional limits and made them want to quit.

Sour grapes and barely veiled racism

I spent more time reassuring them that they had value, and that they were bigger than their small failures, than I ever spent on the fine points of basketball. Still, sometimes one of them would shuck his jersey and walk off the floor in frustration or run up into the stands to fight someone he thought had slighted him. One kid accosted a referee who’d called a foul on him and cocked his fist, before a teammate held him back. But I kept forgiving them for their outrageous displays and encouraging them to forgive themselves for their defeats and small failures. And mostly they listened through the insecurities revealed by their distended pride.

I never stopped wanting to win, or losing sleep over coaching decisions when we lost. But I understood that the final score was insignificant against the emotional learning curves of these guys whose futures might well depend on their ability to deal constructively with adversity. The priority was always survival — keep the team and these young men from self-destructing. Hard as it was, we mostly managed.

So forgive me if I am less than sympathetic to politicians who have chosen to indulge the wild and dangerous delusions of a 74-year-old man — a man granted every privilege this world has to offer and then some — whose emotional frailty does not permit the tough lessons of loss or failure.

Forgive my contempt and impatience at seemingly intelligent and educated men and women who choose to feign stupidity, and assume a relativistic attitude toward objective facts, at the possible expense of our collective survival.

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If President Donald Trump wishes to make legal challenges in courts of law, he is entitled and his posse of political sycophants can defend and promote that entitlement. But the wild and baseless accusations, the barely concealed racism of questioning the votes in Detroit and Philadelphia, that���s what we call sour grapes. That’s sore losing. It’s selling the country out for childish pride.

A tough loss and an example to set

I remember my toughest loss that first year of my high school coaching career. It was at a school in another part of the city. There was a lot of trash talking — players and coaches and fans — and we all wanted so badly to win. We were up at halftime and when we got to the visitor’s locker room, the rolling chalkboard in there was shattered in pieces so we couldn’t diagram anything. After we lost, I complained to their athletic director about the state of that chalkboard and the disadvantage it gave us.

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She apologized and told me, in front of my team, that another opposing coach had punched and kicked that chalkboard to pieces in frustration over his own losing. She said this one had come from the home locker room after yet another embittered losing coach had, along with his team, destroyed the one that used to be in there. The state and the school district were in a fiscal crisis (we were given a 10% pay cut that school year) and she didn’t know when she’d get it replaced.

I remember the expressions on the faces of my dejected players. At the time I wasn’t sure if her words were sobering to them or if they wanted me to punch a few lockers or do some other damage. But I knew they were watching me and that it really mattered what I did and said — and I have never forgotten that.

Young people are watching us now, too.

Larry Strauss has been a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles since 1992. He is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and the author of more than a dozen books, most recently "Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher" and, on audio, "Now's the Time" (narrated by Kim Fields). Follow him on Twitter: @LarryStrauss