Team Culture

Developing a team culture that creates success is extremely hard, and it’s even harder to keep. During my athletic career, I was not part of many championship teams. At the end of each season, I usually find myself trying to identify where we went wrong as a team. It’s never the talent of the players or scheme of the coaches, most of the time it never even has to do with the sport itself.?

Every team has a set of values that are introduced to every member of that team, but the challenge comes from getting every team member to embrace these values and work together to live those values every day.?The best teams and organizations have successfully developed a team culture of trust, focus, discipline, and accountability. One person’s negative attitude or poor work ethic can cause issues within the organization and build resentment among the members.?The most successful teams recognize the benefits of developing this culture and contributing positively to maintain it.??

When I arrived as a freshman at Ball State in 2016, the team was on a slow downward spiral since its 10-3 season in 2013.?After the 2016, 2017, and 2018 season, we had only won 10 out of 36 games.?It was up to us to rebuild the team culture into a positive one through hard work, sacrifice, trust, and belief.

At the start of 2020 with the Covid outbreak, we developed into a player-led team. Since the university was shut down, it was up to us players to stay connected and motivated to continue perfecting our craft. Ironically, being apart is what brought us closer together. When we were finally able to take the field again, we were fueled by gratitude, and set out to play for one another. In December of 2020, we won the Mid-American Conference Championship after a 24-year drought and achieved the programs first-ever bowl game victory. After that win, 20 seniors returned for another year, and what we thought would be another historic year.

?During the 2021 fall camp, the message leading up to the season was that winning was going to be even harder than the year before. One night during our daily team building meetings, one of my coaches spoke about “the little things”, one of our team’s values. He used a fully built Jenga Tower to demonstrate a winning culture. Each block represented a little thing like being on time, getting good grades, or keeping the facility clean. Each time someone was late, missed an assignment, left their locker dirty, a block would be removed from the tower, making it weaker. If you continued removing the blocks, eventually the tower would fall, and the only evidence of that winning culture ever existing is in the trophy case.

?The message was simple, a winning culture takes a lot of time and effort to build. It takes an entire team to make it stronger, but only takes one player to make it weaker. It’s never just talent or even hard work that makes a winning culture. The best teams come together and push each other beyond their preconceived limit through love for one another and the organization. They are willing to sacrifice anything to meet the standard that was set before them.

?I’m forever grateful for every second I spent with Ball State’s colors on my back. I’m even more grateful to have met and played with each member of that team. Every lesson will be used as light to guide me through the rest of life's journey.