Let’s start with joys because I think there have been more joys than challenges 🙂 I love captaining!
- Seeing people improve: this was a joy even when I wasn’t a captain, but for some reason, now that it’s happening while I’m a captain, it seems so much more wonderful. I think it also feel a bit bittersweet because I am a senior and I see all these people, rookies and returners, improving drastically and I know that this is my last year playing with them.
- Letting my creative juices flow: my co-captains and I are really into arts and crafts and now we have an excuse to do even more! We made personalized “membership cards” for the Mona Fitness Club for the indoor winter workouts we do that are supplementary to practice. They’re laminated and everything (picture forthcoming). We also devised an incentive system for playing 3v3 indoor frisbee during exam week that was a raffle and people won cool Mona gear. It was really sweet.
- My Co-Captains: I know it’s really corny to say this, but I love my co-captains. We have a great relationship and feed off each other. It’s also a great combination of love, respect, and honesty: we take each others’ thoughts into consideration, respect what each other says, trust the ultimate knowledge each other has, but also aren’t afraid to call each other out or give feedback.
- There are other things I’m forgetting for sure…
Challenges
- Being a Club Sport – bureaucracy: Being a CS is really hard. I respect my school a lot and also respect varsity athletics, but it’s so hard to get things done. From the feeling of being second-rate, to not enough money, to bureaucracy (despite people’s best efforts), being a club sport can be so frustrating. It’s especially annoying knowing that there isn’t a higher level of ultimate at our school that is getting money or other resources; it’s just us! I wish that meant we could get more resources and money. Overall though this hasn’t been bad as I thought, it’s just tough to work through the frustrations of being a captain and a liaison working through all the paperwork that gets mixed up with my homework and practice plans! A semi-solution has been to be in consistent communication with CS office so we don’t miss a beat.
- Being a Club Sport – no coach: Also as a club sport, being captain also means being a coach. I wish we had a coach who a) knew a lot more about ultimate than I do and b) can play the disciplinary role. I feel like this limits how far our team can get in terms of skill development and I wish we could get farther and had a full-time coach. A “solution” to this has been to just really pool the ultimate knowledge of my co-captains and teammates together and make the best of what we have. We have a sick set of sprint workouts, plyo workouts, and have great mentors for newer players.
- Getting people to commit: As a club sport, there is so little incentive to stay on the team or to come to practice and tournaments consistently because there isn’t really much prestige associated with club ultimate when compared with varsity sports. Being a club sport sometimes makes commitment to the team seem optional. Also with a sport as unique as ultimate, most people haven’t been exposed to it and its wonderful qualities, so you have to convince people it’s not a weird sport and learn to love the game. The solution we’ve been trying with this is having team meetings to re-discuss the commitment expectations, incentivizing practices, making late sprints, etc.
That’s all I can think of for now, but I will add more perhaps later. If you’re interested in a larger discussion of the solutions my co-captains and I have had for the challenges, please message me and I’ll respond in more detail!