Communication is the key to maximizing your team's success. Always start your season with a quality team meeting. Bad coaching and bad playing is inevitable but can be overcome with quality and heart felt communication, starting the first day of the new pre-season. Introduce the team, the season, the opportunity, the challenge. Paint a pretty and powerful picture of the season's potential.
- Introduce:
- Your Expectations On the Field (Individual and Team)
- Your Expectations Off the Field (Individual and Team)
- Your Team Goals
- Define Team and Teamwork. Make them understand and believe in the power of a Team.
- Offer a few examples of a great team vs a great group of athletic stars. (US Hockey Team vs. Russia.)
- Prepare them for the diversity that will challenge the team concept. Make them understand that this will occur at some point during the season. Prepare them, and they will realize, when it happens, that you are the coach that can make them successful.
- Prepare them, for the pain, that coexists, with the commitment to excellence. (Exhausting physical training, busy, long days, mental strain and stress, long road trips, injury etc...)
- Sell them, on the fact, that the glory achieved with success, and the satisfaction received from overcoming their struggles, to be victorious, will create a lasting memory.
- Sell them, on the fact, that the spirit of a champion lies within each and every one of them. Win or lose it is there, inside their sole.
- Challenge your players to bring it out, each and every day.
- Challenge your players to share this spirit, with each other, on and off the field.
- Guarantee your players, if they can do these things, they will have a season they will never forget! Win or lose, they will never forget their season, their teammates and their experiences.
- Teach your players, that at this point, they will all be champions in sport and in their lives.
- And teach them, that in great likelihood they may well become champions in their sport.
- Explain the value of a Sports Champion:
1) Everybody Wants It, Few Get It
2) Very Few Athletes Have The Discipline and Determination To Achieve It
3) Story's and Movies are made about the The Athletes That Do
4) There is No Better Feeling Than That of A Champion
5) There is no Better Feeling than Standing on The Victory Stand, With your Teammates, Victorious!
6) It is a Moment in Time that Will Never Go Away, It Will Always be With You for the rest of Your Life
7) Money Cannot Buy It!
7) It Is A Moment that is Worth Every Bit of Sweat, Blood and Tears Exhausted To Get It.
8) It Is A Moment We Cannot Lose Sight Of During The Fatigue of Training
9) It Is A Moment We Always Understand When We Observe It
10) It Will Be, More than Worth, Every Ounce Of Energy Invested.
Pre-Practice: Spend a few minutes starting every practice with a quick, short meeting. Discuss the goals of practice, remind the team of the above listed points as many will forget. Ask the team for their thoughts regarding the previous match or upcoming match. Nip issues in the bud before they infect the team moral.
Did I leave something out? Feel free to contribute.
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1 comment:
This is good stuff with regard to communication and team meetings. If I may suggest as a coach and sport psychology consultant. Go over your key points as part of your initial meeting. Keep it to 3 or 4 points. Expand your points at the next meeting or add a point at practice until you have communicated what you want. this way you can build and it will be accepted better into the fabric of your team. I've done this as you have and the way I am suggesting and from experience it has been far more effective. Just my suggestion.
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