As I promised in “Championship Mentality” (… about two, and not eight, months ago, so my thoughts are now a little harder to retrieve in the old mental archives, yikes), I’m revisiting an article published this past December in the Daily Illini about the Fighting Illini volleyball team and their team-building efforts. The article talks about how the team sits down once a week every spring to talk about their team’s “core values”, the values their team will use to guide their efforts. Some of the examples given in the article are trust, love, and health.
I like the idea of using core values to build a team and using those values to guide the team. They’re principles or standards that every team member can go back to when training gets hard or when they’ve hit a low point in their season, and even when they’re not going through rough times. They’re lessons that the coaching staff can also apply to the players off the playing field, which is another very important area of development. For example, values like “integrity”, “perseverance”, and “commitment” can be very important for teams and players. “Integrity” is about playing the game fairly, about competing without cheating. “Perseverance” is about pushing through when it’s hard, about sticking with something and working through it until you conquer it — it’s about not giving up. A big one for me is “commitment” — it’s about making sure that every single one of your teammates is willing to make the commitment to the team, to your values, and to winning. That means everyone has promised to give everything they’ve got all the time. Your team goes nowhere if 7/10 people have made that commitment to giving 100%, and the other 3/10 will give what they can when they decide they want to give it.
A quote that I particularly enjoyed from the article was from Coach Hambly: “I’d rather never win it than not do it the right way.”
That’s the message you want to send to your kids — it’s about competing and winning with integrity. If you’re going to sacrifice your integrity and your morals and your core values to win, then you’re on the wrong team. It’s about doing things the right way every single time, and being true to yourself and your team. It’s HUGE coming from a coach, whose career depends on wins, to say that there’s only one way they want to compete and only one way they want to win — the right way.
Kevin Hambly said it way better than I did in a huge, long, rambling post: “Hopefully they started a championship mentality that led to sustained success over time.”
Having a foundation built upon core values (borne of team consensus) is crucial to building winning programs.
As I’m sure is true for many of you reading, ultimate played a big part in my college experience. When I think of college, I’ll always inevitably think of college ultimate and my team. There are a lot of regrets that come to mind when I think of my college ultimate career (that I may write about later but probably not because that is sour grapes, grumpy guss, saddles mcgee material that you should only be subjected to if we’re both drunk and I’ve cornered you on Fourth & Daniel or if I’m crying into your lap/chest at Firehaus), but more than anything I’m proud of what we did as a team through my four years. Unsurprisingly, one of my best memories of college will always be qualifying for Nationals in 2009.
What makes me proud of that accomplishment isn’t the accomplishment itself, great as it was. What makes me proud is everything leading up to the accomplishment and everything that we did to get there. As a team, we made a commitment to our goals and to each other that we’d work hard and bust our asses no matter what. We decided that we’d call each other out when we needed to, but we’d also be there for each other, always. We decided that “pretty good” wasn’t good enough, and that the only people who could decide what happened with our season was us. We decided that we were all in.
What follows after you decide that you’re all in is personal. I can type myself silly trying to recreate that experience for you in prose, but those of you who have been there, those of you who have been through it — you know what I’m talking about, and you know that it’s hard to communicate that experience to people who didn’t go through it with you, and especially so with those who haven’t gone through it at all. It’s an unspoken understanding. Through every triumph, every collapse, every moment when you want to give up, every moment when you think you have it all — what rings true to you and what you remember are your teammates, your team, and your team’s values and goals.
I’m probably butchering the phrase, but the journey is the reward. Outcomes, destinations… those are great, but what I’ll always, always remember in a deep way is the journey. I’ll remember the expectations and the setbacks, the “hey, maybe we have something here…” and the “back to the drawing board” moments. I’ll remember the personal pain, and I’ll remember feeling pain for my teammates as well. I’ll remember the intimacy of it all, how close I felt to everyone, and how many of those people will always be a part of my life. I’ll remember the anticipation, the magic electricity, and the dreaming. But more than anything I’ll remember the way we worked. I’ll remember how it felt to realize that I accomplished something big, something I’ve dreamed about, and I accomplished it not by chance, not by luck, and not by handout — by work, by commitment, and by perseverance. Those values and those standards that have become so ingrained in me have come to define my college ultimate experience and the team I love and remember.
So as you can imagine, graduating from college and my college team was admittedly a difficult experience for me. Even though I was facing a new life without a job and the prospect of living at home, for some reason, the scarier thing seemed to be leaving my team. My great fear became “not recognizing” the team that had become such an integral part of my life and my identity. Luckily, a friend reminded me that change isn’t always necessarily a bad thing. Inevitably, programs change. You can’t stay there forever, and you can’t stop new players from coming in. There will always be new faces, new ideas, and new ambitions — what you hope is that the foundation: your program’s culture — remains.
So figure out what’s important to you and your team. Figure out how you want your team to work, how you want your team to carry themselves, and how you want your team to play. Figure out what values are important to you, what kind of program you’re trying to build, what type of people you want in your program, and what you want your program to stand for or represent. As time and personnel start to turn over, revisit the things you’ve discussed and make sure that it’s all still relevant to your team, and see if there are any new goals, values, or ideas that need to be added. It might seem silly to think about all these big, macro-level things, but when your players and staff aren’t all on the same page, when you don’t all believe in and work for the same things, then your program suffers and it’s that much harder to win.
They say that great programs are “generational” — that is, one great program begets another begets another, begets another, and so on so forth. Players and coaches come and go, but as long as the core values and culture of the team remains intact, then the teams continue to be great. As my dude Geno said, if you play the same way, carry yourself the same way, and expect the same things as the players before you, then regardless of the fact that the personnel will change, the team will manage to always stay the same.
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If you’d like to read more about what I believe creates a culture of winning, click on the label “culture” for the “Winning is a Culture” series.
