To Have A Team, Involve Your Team

Pat Summit won 8 national championships as head coach of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball program.

Despite the countless high-pressure moments that come with winning that regularly, she says the most stressful situation she’s ever been in was selecting the USA team for the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984.

“That job aged me years,” she wrote in her book, Reach for the Summit. “I’ve never had anything stress me like that,” she continued, “For two-and-a-half years, not a day went by that I didn’t think about the Olympics.”

What made Summit so anxious was an embarrassment of riches. How was she going to build a cohesive team when she’d have twelve superstars, seven of whom would be sitting on the bench?

Having sat on the bench for Team USA during the 1975 Pan Am Games, Summit was both empathetic for, and sympathetic towards the players who would be in those roles at a home Olympics. “I know how hard it is and what it can cost in self-esteem,” she wrote.

Rather than avoid the topic, Summit chose to meet it head on. At the team’s first meeting, she told them the truth:

“Seven of you will be sitting on the bench when the game starts. Seven of you will be on the bench when the game ends. Seven of you who are superstars within your own programs are going to have to play roles. Can you handle it? Can you be a cheerleader and supportive of the person playing in front of you?”

Involving The Team

At the Olympic Trials, Summit had the task of making the final round of cuts, whittling the roster down from eighteen players to twelve.

For any coach who’s been tasked with selecting a tournament squad, you know how anxiety-inducing the final process can be.

“I told them to do it,” Summit says.

She passed out confidential ballots and asked the players to vote for the twelve players that should make the team in Los Angeles.

Remarkably, when the results were tallied, the twelve players the team had voted for matched the twelve players the coaches had identified as their preferred roster.

She took the twelve that the players wanted.

While I’m not making the argument that every coach should let their players pick the roster, Summit’s experience shows us how in-sync players and coaches can be.

This collective consciousness often extends beyond picking a side to areas like leadership, vision, and programming.

Gathering input in these areas — through surveys or conversations — can help enrich your decisions as a coach, while also offering the players a sense of control over their destiny. It is this autonomy that is a key motivator for players, and creates the conditions for them to ‘play their assigned roles without complaint’.

Cody’s Notes

• Choose approach behaviour over avoidance behaviour: tell the players the realities of the selection process.

• Selecting a final team for a tournament is one of the most arduous things you can do as a coach.

• Having players select a squad themselves helps them empathize with you as a coach. By cutting their friends or themselves (even as an exercise) they realize how difficult it is to be you.

• Coaches tell me it’s scary to invite player input incase it sends them off track. That is not a good reason to not involve your players.

• Frame input by reminding your players that you are accountable for final decisions. You may take all of their advice, you may take none of it.

• It’s a worthwhile exercise to review your players’ input and explain what ideas you’re adopting (and why) and what ideas you’re not (and why).

• Other areas that are useful to seek player input: voting on leadership group, setting the team’s vision, identifying upcoming challenges, travel requirements, how to make people feel like they belong.