Coaches Corner 5 Signs that We’ve Lost the Meaning of TEAM Part 1 Team means everything in softball. Without one you can’t even play softball, and with a great one, well, chances are special things might happen to you like they did to the University of Oklahoma! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In our madness to get college scholarships we’ve lost our way and with it, we’ve lost the meaning of TEAM. And the dangers of doing so in a “team sport” are devastating! This is part 1 of a 2 part article. Read Part 2. If you read my newsletter often then you know I do my best to help and educate and shy away from ranting and raving about my opinions. Please know that’s my intention with this topic as well, but I really truly believe that we’ve entered the Team Apocalypse and I feel compelled to speak out. I know that might sound dramatic, and even overblown, but let me lay out my case for the 5 signs that I believe tell us we’ve lost the meaning of team, and then see if I’ve lost the plot, as my Aussie friends like to say. And if you don’t speak Aussie, then after reading my 5 points see if you think I’m nuts. Let’s start with the meaning of Team. Webster’s Dictionary defines a Team as the following: 1team noun êm Definition of TEAM : a number of persons associated together in work or activity: as a group on one side (as in football or a debate) While this definition isn’t wrong, it doesn’t really capture the true meaning of the word “team” in the way that those of us playing team sports use it to describe more than just a group of people. You see to me, there’s a HUGE difference between a group of people and a team. We’re in groups all the time – at Disneyland, in movie theatres, in malls, even waiting in our cars at a traffic light. But, these aren’t teams. Sure, you all have something in common like enjoying rides, or that particular movie, or shopping or driving, but that’s where it ends. And while you might be polite with other people in the mall or in line for the same ride, you don’t work together in any way. Teams are different than groups. The members of teams are trying to work together to achieve something. They’ve got to cooperate, determine roles, play their roles well and communicate. Teams exist because together you’re more powerful that you are apart, or because it takes everybody on the team to play the game. Sports like tennis and golf and swimming and running can be played by one person so there is no need for a team. Have you ever tried playing softball by yourself? You can’t do it. You might act like you can, or think you’d be better off without your crummy teammates, but just once try playing a softball game without any teammates and see how good you are – you’d lose to a horrible team. So here’s the best example of a Team vs a Group that I’ve ever heard, and it involves an elevator. Think about the last time you were in an elevator. No doubt you were with a group of people. You probably didn’t know them; you were all just using the elevator to get where you were going. So you had something in common but other than making room for people and possibly pushing their button for them, you didn’t have to work together in any capacity. Now imagine that elevator gets stuck in between floors! Boom, that group just became a team. Suddenly you have a mission, you have more than something in common – you’re all compelled and motivated to accomplish something, like getting out! So what happens next? People assume different roles, right. The Leaders start figuring out the plan, the followers carry out the plan, the scaredy-cats hide in the back but everyone must work together to get out of the elevator. The clearer that everyone is about how they can best help the situation and the more the group works together the faster everyone will get out. That’s exactly how a good softball team operates. Players need to first have a c ommon mission (like winning games, or playing their best, or outscoring their opponents), then they have to have roles (stars, support players, bench players, specialists) and then they all have to cooperate and perform their role well in order to achieve their mission. Think about this year’s WCWS winning team The University of Oklahoma. They had some stars like Keilani Ricketts and Lauren Chamberlain but they also had support players like Brianna Turang and Georgia Casey and role players like Michelle Gascoigne as well as bench players you never heard of. But every single player on that team not only had a specific role (keep in mind that all roles aren’t equal since all skills aren’t equal), but they all valued each other’s roles! They definitely got out of their elevator! Now let’s look at most current-day Travelball teams. They operate more like groups than teams – people temporarily on the elevator simply waiting for the next floor. Players fight against the role they’re given instead of accepting it or working hard to change it. Casting blame out-weighs cooperation and winning takes a huge back seat to personal advancement and visibility. And while the concept of team might sound too ideal for those of you currently in the trenches trying to earn a softball scholarship, keep this in mind – you’re working to have a college softball TEAM ask you to become a part of it, and all that involves. So I ask you – are you ready for what it takes to be a member of a real Team, and if not, you better start getting ready NOW. So, after watching softball on all levels botch up the concept of TEAM, here are my 5 Signs that We’ve Lost the Meaning of TEAM: 1.Team Jumping – Players change teams all the time now. It starts in Travelball where it’s common for players to play on 3-4 different teams in one summer! Granted, you can make a poor decision regarding which team to join, but after 4 bad decisions it simply makes you look like a bad decision maker. Changing teams all the time is a huge warning sign to anybody paying attention (like college coaches) since it makes them wonder what’s wrong with you that you can’t stay on one team? I see players leave a team simply because they don’t play enough, or play the position they want to play, instead of practicing more so they’re better. Changing teams may be your short-term answer but if you truly are trying to play college softball then changing teams gets a whole lot more difficult and carries with it a lot greater penalties and consequences at the collegiate level. 2.Guesting – This is almost like changing teams without actually calling it that. Players that guest are actually on one team, but then leave that team to “guest” on other teams. I’m sorry but there’s NO WAY you’re a team player if you’re guesting all the time. I’m not trying to be mean by saying this, I’m simply being factual since you can’t possibly care about your teammates if you’re leaving them all the time to play with other teams. Players that guest all the time have definitely put themselves ahead of their team and that’s not what a college coach is out there looking for. Never mind that they can’t even find you to watch you play because they can’t keep track of what team you’re on this weekend. 3.It Wasn’t My Fault – It’s interesting but nothing is anyone’s fault anymore. Pitchers blame their defense if they don’t pitch well, coaches blame players, parents blame coaches and everyone says “it’s not my fault”. Well it has to be somebody’s fault, and besides, who cares about fault. What matters when somebody makes a mistake is how quickly you’re going to fix it, not how fast can you declare you didn’t do it. Mistakes don’t kill you; they happen all the time at all levels. What will kill you is acting like you didn’t do them, blaming others and never figuring out how to fix the things you’ve messed up. Playing on a team isn’t about placing blame, it’s about helping your teammates, it’s about working together, it’s about being good on a day when your teammate isn’t and knowing that she’ll cover for you on your off-day. Teams help and work and play for each other – they don’t complain and blame and leave each other hanging. I detail signs 4 & 5 in Part 2 of this article. In the meantime for more help with this topic, and to help instill TEAM values within your team, check out the following: 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: 4.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! 5.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!
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 11:53:08 +0000
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