The Growth of Self-sustaining Team – Where Could We Improve?
Background
The Ultimate Frisbee is as of now also an ultimate “do it yourself” sport (the same stands for any sport that has not yet been recognized by sponsors). It’s though important to realize what goes hand in hand with lack of sponsors. When any investor has put any amount of money into any team, it is in its best interest to support the team on as many fronts as possible. And on the contrary, when you lack any kind of financial support, you have to do everything yourself. You have to coach yourself, organize trainings, team buildings, the tournaments, team’s plans, etc. The room for improvement in this state is basically infinite. As always, when I’m part of anything, I actively try to contribute to the well-being of the group. And now I will try to do so through this post.
What we are already doing well
The season has passed and we experienced couple of ups and downs. I was trying to dig to the deepest reachable (by me) cores of the team and search for the problem there. It then struck me that we as an organized unit work pretty well. We have the only men’s trainings in the whole Czech Republic. We have something called “Leadership(t) structure” that assigns responsibilities to several team members, effectively transforming them into semi-captains/coaches. We also have one of the best coaches (if not THE best) in entire CZ too. We have found quite cheap and awesome field to train on and throughout most of the season we had very good amount of players actually attending them.
We have also proved that we can compete with the best of the best (in Europe) by defeating Germans National team (one of the best national teams in the World) and CUSB Bologna (multiple European finalists). That proves that we are not physically unprepared (even though there is always room for improvement, but not like we are not working on it), or that we lack good usable strategies, or simply the skill. We’ve got that all and even if something was not yet to mature, we have huge potential to climb that ladder still. So where the fuck was the problem? I had to dig even deeper.
The MINDSET
The problem lies in individual heads. Let me elaborate more. Try to visualize a match, where your awesome coach and captain is also an actively playing player. Its humanly impossible to keep track of all the important stuff like how really are the team players contributing to the team, how often they are called to playing formation, whether they still have the strength to make 100% effort on the field and so on. The players have to be conscious and help him. Ideal would of course be to HAVE a non-playing coach and our coach will surely do that when he retires from playing, but now we have to do with what we have. Anyway, there are several sub-mindset categories, which can be improved.
Doing what is good for the team, not the individual
One of the biggest problems of our team is that it is full of egoistic players. They are all really good, but being egoistic rarely helps. There are several outcomes of this attitude.
The need to play at all costs
What the majority of good players think is that the more they play, the better the team will do. That is actually one of the biggest bullshits. Current situation is that at the start of every point 5 players (out of 7 that would play the point in total) always step up to the line and want to play. Now truth is that those players are probably the best. The tournament is though really long and the more points one is playing, the less effective he becomes over time. For example one of our best defensive players is super strong marker. When he though plays 5 defenses in raw, he starts chilling here and there on the field in order to sustain the ability to play all the points in raw. He starts to relax while he’s marking, thus killing he’s most effective place on the field. If he only played 3 points in raw, he could sustain the hard mark all the time and produce more defenses.
This attitude is not only executed by this player. Most of the players think that if they’ll play all the time, the team will be better for it. For the next season we either have to have a nonplaying guy assigned to keep track of the playtime of every player, or we need to build some kind of team consciousness where every player will realize what his fuckin job for the team is and will not sacrifice his biggest strengths just to get more playing time.
Playing with the first open guy
Another backbone of the selfish players is, that they think they are the ones that will win us the point by their awesome throw. Yet another bullshit. Two years ago when our offence was shining the most, everyone always threw to the first open player. That created the much needed flow, thus making our offence practically unstoppable for the opposition. Now though when 4 out of 7 players think that they need to make a good progressive throw, we often times find ourselves in situation when one guy keeps the disc for way to long and enables the defensive players to regain good guarding position.
Sacrifices
It is important to have the mindset that I’m the team and team is me. The higher the league we play in is, the more the players will be willing to sacrifice themselves to gain that one fucking inch. If we want to keep up with them, the only way to do so is to have that mindset too. For example one of the best players was never willing to go to the ground when the disc wasn’t incoming in perfect position. When it’s windy, or the defensive players are just tough and always behind you, you can’t always make a simple catch. If you want to increase the % of the catch happening you have to roll for it or jump for it from time to time. When you’re one of the best players on the team, your willingness to sacrifice boost every others willingness to sacrifice, since you’re a morale leader. Leaders work this way. The player I was talking about actually really improved during this season, but there are other experts that could follow his example.
Leadership(t) structure v.2.0.
The Leadership(t) structure is about 3 years old. Since all of the leaders are doing their best to support the growth of the team, new unsolved problems arise. Simply put, the stuff that needs to be taken care of during, but even outside of the actual game, is so immense that slowly but surely another “leaders” need to be selected. We as the team realize that and have actually been doing something about it. For example I was selected as new coach of our B team. Our “beginners policy” improved a lot this season. Also the has selected a palyer that will take care of our basic PR needs (taking care of facebook page and stuff). Since im not part of the higher leadership structure, I cant really know where we still lack people.
Since we don’t have the non-playing coach, we need to divide the important stuff such a person would be doing and assign quite some players to individual matters. My vision is following. We would have a player that would be actively scanning the opposing team for their used strategies. Another older player that doesn’t play that much (or an injured player) would be helping those that are calling people to the field by giving information about play time of individual players. Offence and defense would have assigned up to two players that would be selecting people for every point. Right now it is one and the one that plays the most. Such a player needs to be supported by someone who plays less, therefore has more time to evaluate the current contribution of the players. I would also restrict players from “self-nominating” themselves every single point.
Summary
The problems we have are mainly in our heads. We do not trust each other like other teams obviously do and we mainly look firstly at ourselves. This is though not how team works. It doesn’t matter whether you’re tired injured, playing well, or playing shit. You are part of the team and there is always something you can do to help it – play more, play less, support the team from the sideline, try to get to know some of the opposing tactics, etc. There are actually no limits. But first people would need to stop being sad/angry when they don’t play as much as they expect, or think that the only way how to support the team is to never stop playing. The more we get rid of the savior instinct and start working as coherent unit, the better we will work. Finally our limit would truly be in European top 8. Until then we will have moments when we will be up (individuals doing extraordinary well and winning the game), or downs (well the exact opposite).
This was highly needed. Thanks for sharing, much appreciated
Well thanks:) are you a part of any self-sustaining team?