5 SIGNS THAT WE’VE LOST THE MEANING OF TEAM PART 2 By: Cindy Bristow This is the 2nd of my 2 part article on 5 Signs that we’ve lost the meaning of TEAM In my last article we looked at how strongly the issues of Team Jumping, Guesting and Fault impact the concept of TEAM. Now let’s explore the final 2 signs of how much we’ve lost the meaning of TEAM. In 5 Signs That We’ve Lost The Meaning Of Team Part 1 we looked at the definition of a team and how an elevator can help us understand the difference between a group and a team. All great teams operate the same way, through cooperation, communication, consideration, and commitment – whether you’re talking about the Miami Heat, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Baltimore Ravens or the University of Oklahoma Softball Team! Having a team with a common mission and determining roles within the team to accomplish that mission is crucial for team success. But it’s also what is lacking today in most Travelball teams. Please know that this is NOT a slam on travelball, travelball coaches or the players that play it. I think travelball has a lot of tremendous benefits and lessons to pass on to developing softball players, and I respect and admire the coaches and parents that give so much of their lives and time to helping theirs, and other people’s kids. But, I think we can all admit that there’s been a shift in the game away from the concept of TEAM, and toward the individual player. We’ve shifted from wanting to win tournaments to wanting to play in showcases. Our games now have time limits so we can cram in more of them, instead of trying to play fewer games, but win them. Players switch teams, guest on teams and declare “it wasn’t my fault” with such regularity that nobody can keep track – especially the college coaches who it seems everyone is now playing for. Without a strong concept of the qualities it takes to have a good team and to be a great team member how is a young softball player ever going to become a part of a college softball team? Cooperating with a group of people and learning how to share things like playing time, the spotlight, the workload and roles are not only important to playing on a successful team – these qualities are crucial to advancing in the workplace and to simply having a great home life. The recent trend away from placing the “team” ahead of the individual is very alarming to me. I hear everyone say they want to get a college scholarship, and while that’s a great ambition, it seems that the key point they’re all missing is that they’re aspiring to become a part of a TEAM, without focusing on any team skills in order to get them there. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, or to all those college coaches. When college coaches are out recruiting players they want to find 2 things: 1) Winners, and 2) Team Players. Of course they’re looking for skill – but everyone these coaches consider has skill. What the college coaches are trying to do is figure out what recruits will be able to use their skills to beat their opponents. The “will to win” will allow their new recruits to fight through the frustrations that come with playing college softball, and being a team player shows the college coach which recruit can fit their skills into the team they have back at their college. So here are the 2 remaining Signs that We’ve Lost the Meaning of TEAM: Showing vs Winning – Showing your talent is a whole lot different than using your talent to win. To me, the reason we’ve lost our way in regards to the concept of team is because travelball players no longer care about winning and fighting to win, they simply want to go somewhere and show somebody their skill. Sure, having college coaches see you play is important to you and to them, but there’s a HUGE difference between “showing your skills” and using them to win a game! Throwing for time and making a critical throw in a game are two very different things! College coaches want to recruit winners! The minute we switched from playing softball games where the results actually mattered to playing for time, cramming in a million games in 2 days and simply showing our skills – we quit producing winners and we cheated our young players out of the opportunity to really discover the meaning of competing. And believe me, if you get to play college softball you better know how to compete! We Value the Wrong Skills – The final sign that the Team Apocalypse is upon us is that we now value how fast someone pitches or throws or hits over the way these skills fit into winning. Our collective obsession with “showing” college coaches our players at the earliest of ages instead of focusing on critical softball team-skills has all but killed the concept of team. Skills like moving a teammate over with a great sac bunt, or hitting for singles are sidelined for bat speed and homeruns. Sure those are important and impressive, but not when the championship’s on the line against the best pitcher in the country and your team is hitless. Foot speed is always important to have, but not when it comes in exchange for selfishness, laziness and whining. To figure out what skills really matter to a great team flash back to the elevator I talked about in Part 1. Once it gets stuck, does it really matter whose fault it was, or what should have been done differently, or how other elevators you’ve been on in the past don’t get stuck. Of course not – the only thing that matters is working together to get out of this elevator right now. Cooperation, Calmness, Creativity, Competitiveness, Desire, and Stick-to-it-iv-ness are things that will ensure you all get out of that situation, so we need to start practicing and rewarding and recognizing these attributes in our players! Within the youth softball world we seem to have lost our patience with teaching and development and have turned toward an insistence on performance. We’ve lost the concept of young players needing time and patience and teaching in order to develop their skills and talents and yet that’s what the younger age group programs are all about. The younger aged programs are for teaching players the skills they’ll need when they get older, and not for demanding those young players suddenly have those skills without going through any reasonable learning curve. Too many parents and coaches have lost patience with development and see every single error or delay in progress as a blockade to that golden ticket of a college scholarship. No coach wants a player that only makes errors, but on the other hand, every great player makes errors. Great players aren’t great because they’ve eliminated errors; they’re great because they recover immediately from them. If we’re really serious about developing top level softball players then we need to show more patience with our young players and help them better deal with the emotions associated with making a mistake. We need to show them how to quickly correct their mistakes and move on instead of blaming others or dwelling on them. The ability to stay calm during big moments, to have confidence in your skill, to work hard to improve yourself away from team practice, to support your teammates and to be very teachable are the skills that will really make you a good college softball player. Help encourage, support and value these skills to help them grow within your players! And softball isn’t the only sport that’s dealing with the issue of over-charged travel teams and lack of skill development at the younger levels. USA Hockey had to curb the creation of elite superteams so they stopped holding a peewee national championship. Finally, they began discouraging younger players from full-ice games and instead, encouraged them to play other sports. This astonishing shift was triggered by the fact that USA Hockey realized kids introduced to hockey weren’t sticking with it – that by age 9, 43 percent had quit hockey all together! We certainly don’t want this to happen in softball, so we need to pay attention now to making our youth programs fun and developmental. Softball is a team sport which means it requires a group of people to first get together, and then come together to achieve a goal. If it’s not getting out of your stuck elevator then what is your goal? Maybe it’s to help everyone learn to better manage their frustration when they make a mistake, or to help learn more skills, or to increase the speed of the skills they currently have, or to use your skills to beat other teams. Whatever your team goals are they require everyone on the team to have a role and to play their role well. Not all roles will be the same since not all players are the same but that is a great thing about softball – we need the fast and the slow, the tall and the short, the light and the heavy, the great and the average. We are an equal-opportunity sport unlike most other team or individual sports. But unlike individual sports like golf, and tennis and running and swimming, in softball we need other people in order to play the game. People in individual sports only need themselves so it makes sense that these sports are about the individual. But it makes NO SENSE that softball has become about the individual. The great thing about watching the WCWS is seeing every player on every team cheering their guts out for their teammates. You don’t see the bench players sitting back in the dugout complaining about how they think they should be playing. Instead, they’re slammed up against the fence cheering and screaming at the top of their lungs! And the players that get to be on the field hear their teammates and work that much harder knowing they don’t get to play. Sure, you know the names Ricketts and Turang and Chamberlain, but for every player you know on the University of Oklahoma Softball team there are 3 you’ve never heard of. But these unknown players worked just as hard as the stars, got up just as early and tried just as much. In fact, they helped push the stars to work even harder to keep their starting positions, which is why the stars value those bench players. Great teams are about the TEAM, and never about the individual. We need to get back to a place where we value the team more than the player, and where being a part of a team is so special you NEVER want to leave it! And PS – you’ll need these skills in life as well! For more help with this topic, and to help instill TEAM values within your team, check out the following:
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 11:35:00 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015