Coaches love preseason. There are no pesky classes to distract the athlete’s attention, we get to be in the gym a lot, and most importantly…we get to see what we’re working with in terms of our new team. Even if you’ve got lots of players returning, you’re still going to have different team dynamics. Whether it’s returners coming back in great shape and with better skills or newbies coming in ready to challenge for playing time, your team will need to create an identity for this season.
One of the things that works well in those first days, when the players are concerned about what the coaches are thinking and looking out of the side of their eye trying to figure out how their teammate’s skills rate compared to theirs, is having them tell their story. I got this idea at a Women Coaches Academy convention. I just told my team to bring five important things with them to campus and that they’d share with everyone…coaches also participated. It was fun to hear what everyone thought was important and the added bonus was our “quiet as a mouse” players had to speak up too. You’ll learn all sorts of stuff: the alarmingly large amount of your players who brought stuffed animals with them to college, good info about their parents and siblings, their quirky eating habits, your first year students who are homesick…you’ll get it all.
I believe in team chemistry and believe that the base for great chemistry is knowledge. They simply need to get to know each other as a team…not last season’s team.
I suppose you can do all sorts of variations on this theme, whatever works for your program. This year I’m thinking about having them talk about what they did this summer and bring something tangible (picture, etc.) that represents it. Can you think of other variations that would work for teams?