In sports you can do one of two things when you’re in a slump: dig in and go hard OR roll over and give up. There were a couple of weeks there where the volleyball team I help with was in a slump. They looked like they were playing hard, and I don’t doubt for a second that they were not doing their best, but things just weren’t going our way.
The girls weren’t playing to their abilities, part of it might be that they don’t really know just how good they are, they’ve made comments about how good others are out there that they’ve competed against. Hearing the comment I’ll tell them, “You’re so good too.” To which the usual reply is “Oh, not that good.” Maybe if they could actually watch themselves play they’d feel differently because their skills are comparable to the top 16U’s in the province.
Getting back to the slump… no doubt the players were frustrated, I’m sure their parents were frustrated, and us coaches… well, we were too because we were at a loss of what to do for the girls. But despite being frustrated, nobody wavered. The girls had team meetings and determined what they could do, they gave suggestions to the coaching staff of what we could do, and the coaching staff looked into ways to help the girls, which essentially goes back to our core beliefs as a team.
The mission? To have fun and give it 100 percent, each time, every time, all the time, no matter what. The head coach found a video of an NBA coach talking about exactly what we were going through, in sports slumps happen, and to be able to get out of them is huge, but you need the G.R.I.T. – our slogan this year which stands for Grace, Respect, Integrity, and Team – to handle the situation.
One of the things this NBA coach said was that a time-out should be left to the players. If they have nothing to say then the coach steps in with one or two things to focus on, but otherwise it’s left to them. Oddly enough, we did this by accident at our first tournament in Yorkton this year and the girls played very well. So, after a professional coach basically says it works, why not try it, after all we had already had some success with it by accident in Yorkton.
In these time outs, I stood outside and yes, I eavesdropped on the first few conversations, which impressed me to no end. The captain of the team stepped into the role of running the time out. She kept their attention if they turned to watch the game on the other court, was encouraging, and was actually saying everything the coaching staff would have been saying. She was asking for input from the others to see what they thought they could improve and together they made a game plan and successfully executed it. At the beginning of the game too an injured player watched the other team warm up and told her team what she saw, to still help.
After a game or two of listening in on their time out conversations, I eventually just walked away, it was handled. The girls are all capable: they’re intelligent and athletic, which makes them perfect to discuss and develop a plan on the fly. If one thing isn’t working, suggestions of doing this or that, and deciding on it as a team was very helpful.
Their character and sense of team impresses me every day.
We also changed our team goal to help us get out of our slump, which is now kept on the shoes of the girls. One letter of the message is carried on the left shoe of each of the athletes, and no… none of the girls will tell you what it is.
Last year I had made a deal with them that if they got top eight in the province that I would get a tattoo of our logo. They did it, so I got the tattoo, and I haven’t regretted it for a second because of the people it represents. I’m thankful to coach such an amazing group of young women.
