Creating a Positive Team Culture: Defining, Reinforcing, and Celebrating Team Values
By recognizing and rewarding athletes who embody the team's values, coaches can create a positive team culture where athletes are motivated to uphold the values and support one another. This recognition also reinforces to athletes that their behavior and actions have an impact on the team's success and encourages them to continue to strive towards embodying the team's values. Additionally, recognizing and rewarding athletes who uphold the team's values can foster a sense of pride and ownership in the team's culture, leading to increased commitment and dedication from the athletes.
Time Out or Pause?
Games are high-stress for everyone—players, coaches, parents, and fans alike experience increased heart rates and crazy emotions throughout the game. I often get asked, “How do I make my athletes more mentally tough?”
Creating a learning environment
When I get classroom time with athletes, I am very intentional about the atmosphere I create for them to walk into. There is music playing, the board is prepared with whatever we are going over, they know what I expect of them, and I do some fun activities to shift their mindset from the monotony of school to a playful attitude they can bring into practice.
Every Child Just Wants to be Seen
We can love someone and still be less than present at times. But to “see” someone requires us to be fully engaged and present.
Activity: Hero, Hardship, Highlight
The Purpose of this activity is to challenge each athlete to reflect on their life and nail down three moments that have aided in who they are today.
Fear and Faith
Choose faith. Choose to prepare yourself and believe in your training. It has been said many times and I believe it to be true, “Champions do not rise to the level of competition, instead they drop to their level of training.”
Losing Twice in one Game
You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.
The Simple Playbook
During warm ups, instead of running a lap or doing sprints, we see how fast we can run from the huddle to the line of scrimmage, run a play for 15 yards, then sprint back to the huddle. They are timed and they want to get faster. We have 8 plays so we do it 8 times. We celebrate shaving seconds off our time. Lining up fast during a game is intimidating to the other team, and parents love it.
How to Create the Ultimate Teammate
The subject of "creating culture" has been buzzing as of late so I thought I would share a couple notes on ways I have found to create a fun and successful culture.
Getting the Parents Involved in Practice
Toward the end of every season, I schedule a "kids vs parents" game. A great time to do this is when the team is not doing so well and needs to have some fun, or at the end of the year party. There are many different ways to do this. Here are some tips to make it go smoothly:
Learning about your new team
Those simple, quiet moments you have with an athlete are the moments they will remember for the rest of their lives.