With less than a week until I go back to Hendrix, there are a lot of things that need to be taken care of. I’ve been grappling with my Watson and making sure I don’t shoot myself in the foot (which I may already have) before the interview, while trying to deal with the mass amounts of snow outside that just won’t go away… and of course, figuring out a rough plan for this upcoming semester. Over the summer, I had an outline of the things I wanted to do and where I expected us to be throughout the fall season. Although it wasn’t perfect, it did give me a good sketch of the semester and gave me a bit of comfort when it actually came down to planning practice every week. I’m trying to do that again for the spring… and it’s proving to be difficult for several reasons.
I was fortunate enough to speak to Michelle over the phone last week and the conversation gave me a lot to think about. With about 28 women on our roster, our team is quite the handful. I’m amazed at how many girls we have. I’m not really sure how it all happened –it’s almost like something just exploded and all these girls interested in ultimate just randomly showed up, all at once. I’m not complaining; I love having enough women to scrimmage with at practice and I love sharing ultimate with people even more. But taking that many girls to a tournament… is just a bit ridiculous, if not downright foolish. Not to mention thoughtless, since no girl would get any decent amount of playing time. Needless to say I have yet to take more than 17 girls to a tournament.
So how do we deal with these numbers? Michelle made me realize… Perhaps it’s time to split the team into two. The question is, how does this team go about doing it? That, my friends, is the tricky bit.
I’ve mulled over it a lot, read through the vast majority of the College Women’s Ultimate Resources Manual, and had come up with some basic thoughts. We could do X and Y for the majority of the semester, practicing together, and easing the girls into the idea of having A and B teams, and perhaps only taking an A team to Sectionals. We would separate from the boys a bit more, having two women-only practices a week instead of just one –while still having a couple of the guys help and teach us stuff that we may still be having difficulties with. Ya know, preliminary thoughts.
Finally, I decided to email two of the men on the team who I know care a lot about ultimate, but also, care a lot about the women on the team. And, seeing as the Hendrix men recently split into two teams last year, they would know how I was feeling.
They both responded… albeit very differently. The first response held a lot of the same thoughts I did… a lot of good advice, but with fair warnings about a lot of the obstacles that I, and the women’s team, would face as we split into two. The second response was a bit more of a surprise. And it all dawned on me fairly quickly.
The response was direct and simple: these girls just want to have fun. Winning is important to them, but fun is top priority. And it may trump winning.
For the past semester, I thought I had it right: I thought I knew what these girls, and what this team, wanted. I remember talking to them last year, telling me about how they wanted to be more competitive, how they wanted to win a game in a tournament because they didn’t know what it felt like. I couldn’t blame them for wanting a win –going into my senior year, I was only one of two girls who knew what it was like for the Gliders to take home wins from a tournament. At the start of fall semester, it had been since Sectionals of my freshman year since we had won a game. Itchfest and Harvest Moon both changed that with a win at each, but still.
In this past semester, I had gotten so wrapped up in getting these girls to experience a win. I had gotten so wrapped up in reinstating a discipline and competitiveness that had somehow been lost since my freshman year. I did a lot of yelling. We had a lot of growing pains. I think we still do.
But somehow, in all of that, I think I lost sight of some things. The second response made me really question how well I know their desires and goals. For the past year now, I’ve been under the impression that we, as a team, wanted to be stronger, more competitive –but maybe I have this all wrong. Maybe that’s not what this team really wants, and instead we should just focus on fun being our top priority. I’m not saying that you can’t be both competitive and fun; personally, I think you can easily have both.
We have so much potential. And I want us to push ourselves to new levels. But at the end of the day, it’s what the team wants. Part of me feels like an idiot –how can I be captain and not know what this team wants? I find myself wondering the same thing right now. But regardless of all that, what I do know is that every girl on this team deserves equal playing time. Because playing time = fun. And if all 28 of them are going to have fun, then one team isn’t going to be enough. So now, perhaps I’m back at square one. We’ve got two teams to make, but how we go about making them is the true question.