A team is a weird thing to explain. When you’re a young kid, you grow up playing sports with all of your buddies from the town. You’re on various teams, but you don’t really understand what it means yet, and you’re just having fun playing the game. You get a little bit older, and adults start to get involved. Expectations, disappointment, politics; they all make their way into the team and try their best to ruin the purity of the game. The thing that saves you is the team. Its easy to forget about all of the problems and pressures of the world when you’re around a bunch of guys you can laugh with.
By the time you’re in high school, you might be playing next to the same guy you’ve played with since you were ten years old. Things like this are truly incredible. When you can look to your left and look to your right, and know that each guy is in it with you through thick or thin, you feel like you can’t be beat.
The best thing about teams is that the same guys you play with become your best friends off of the playing field. Its natural; you spend so much time together, share the same experiences, so of course you spend time outside of the game talking about anything and everything. You TRUST them. They run next to you when the coaches are pissed off and decide its time to teach the team a lesson. They pick you up when you throw your helmet because you’ve been playing like garbage for the last two weeks. They take you out when your girlfriend is giving you a hard time to try and raise your spirits. They pull for you-always.
No team is perfect, fights happen. In the heat of competition, or even in the locker room, things are said and sometimes a guy has just had enough. Most times, some pushing and shoving, a few curse words, but then it’s done. The next day you slap hands, flash a grin and say, “I would have had you if they hadn’t broken it up.”
The only thing that destroys a team is when somebody inside the circle decides they want to break the bond. What I’m getting at is when a guy runs to the coaches anytime something is said, or anytime things aren't going smoothly. Rather than handling it in house, this type of guy feels so powerless in his situation that he decides to “run and tell” rather than man up and handle his issues within the team. Are the coaches a part of the team? Sort of. They facilitate things, give the players directions, etc. But there are some things the coaches need to know about, and other things that can be handled in-house. There is NOTHING more damaging to a team, than when a coach brings up something that was said in confidence amongst the players. Something that was not to be repeated so that one guy could get a pat on the butt. This type of thing ruins a team if not addressed. The same way that lack of trust ruins a friendship, a marriage, you get the point. You may think I’m blowing this out of proportion, but if you’ve been there you know I’m not. I don’t give a damn how good you are, what year you’re in, or what your parents do for a living. If you’re on my team, all I ask from you is that you have my back like I’ll have yours. That when somebody gives you some back talk, you handle it like a man and address it face to face. If you feel the need to go whine to a coach at this point in your life, you might as well punch your ticket out of here, because the guys on the team don’t forget.
Photos: http://abritishman.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/a-disillusioned-robinson-cano-reacts-after-having-witnessed-his-team-lose-to-the-netherlands-3-2-in-the-first-round-of-pool-play.jpg
http://www.gonzaga.edu/Main/UploadedFiles/Image/DogPile_BaseballStory.jpg
Subscribe to my Podcast (Itunes)
Subscribe to my Podcast (RSS)
No comments:
Post a Comment