Lessons from a Competitive 16U Softball Team

This last weekend I had the opportunity to spend 2 days with a powerful group of young women that are on a missions this year.

You might think I'm crazy, but one of my favorite things about coaching is working with athletes and teaching them more about life than about the sport.

Let me explain. Several years ago, I was one of those coaches... I expected greatness, wanted to win (probably too much) and found myself frustrated when the young athletes couldn't perform. I yelled, a lot. Candidly, I wasn't a great coach. I know several of the girls probably quit because I coached the way I grew up being coached, only to later realize that it didn't work anymore. I had a college coach that used to say to me during practice, "If you can't make that play here in practice, you probably aren't good enough to play in the game." Needless to say, I have little respect for that coach. I worked as hard as I could, beat out all of his "recruited" players and ended up starting almost every game. Much to the coaches demise.

So when I started coaching again, I fell into a few of the same habits. I had a team of girls that hated the game (like I did), hated me, and probably didn't care much for each other. It felt like there was always some sort of competition. The girls competing against each other and parents that were always lobbying for playing time for their girls.

About 4 years ago, we hired an EOS Worldwide Implementer Aaron Marcum and he forever changed my perspective on business and in life.

You see, I have been running a business for 10 years on missed opportunities because of lack of accountability and failure to communicate expectations. He taught me that in order to run a successful business I have to set goals, expectations and bring a whole new level of accountability to the table.

I realized through that process that I had to change the way I coached. I actually stepped away from the game for a year to just enjoy watching my daughter grow up and learn a better way of teaching the youth. I learned about Core Values, Communication and Expectations. I learned about building healthy teams. And what has come of it has been fun.

This team is a really talented team. But talent will get beat when talent isn't willing to work hard. Hard work isn't always physical. In the case of this team it's both physical, mental and emotional.

We decided as a team to take a different approach to this year's team. We are focusing on Core Values as a team. I gave each girl the opportunity to come up with words they want to live by for this year. I heard words like, #work #hardwork #togetherness #passion and loved each suggestion.

Ultimately we came to the conclusion of 5 words that come from the acronym C.A.T.E. We focus on this and these words alone. We discuss them before and after each game and practice.

#confidence - We as a team believe that positivity and positive reinforcement is the only way to truly build a successful team. We focus on the positive and realize the negative will happen.

#communication - We focus on overcommunication on and off the field. We talk openly and have powerful mature conversation about playing time, frustrations, discouragements. We talk about player frustrations, expectations, opportunities. We talk about how there are opportunities to earn playing time.

#attitude - We believe that the controllable things are important. We teach the word "Equanimity" which means not to high or not to low. Even keel! I have a passionate group of athletes, but we are teaching them to become powerful, emotionally controlled individuals.

#trust - We teach that each player must trust each other, but more importantly they need to trust themselves and their abilities. They also need to trust the process. This is probably more difficult among parent than it is players. I understand that players want to trust coaches, but when parents are continuously questioning the decisions of coaches it becomes hard for the players to understand who to trust. We teach trust the coaches and the parents, but learn how to understand the system. We also teach to trust each other.

#effort - The best thing I could ever teach one of my players is effort. Give it your best. That's the motto I teach my children. Give it your best in everything you do and the results will follow.

It has been an honor to be able to learn the life lessons from these 14 amazing young ladies! Now, let's continue to grow, fail, learn and compete!