team sport values and full value contracts

The title is a bit of a mouthful but bear with me here.  I get to interact with a lot of sports teams and there are common practices in all of them.  One common practice concerns team building or, rather, how teams are not built.  They're not constructed from a foundation of an agreed and shared culture: how will be behave toward one another and what do we want from our experience?  The first point to make about building a team culture is that it serves two outcomes: team performance and team experience.  My experiences have shown me that by developing the right team experience, we place ourselves in the strongest position to control team performance.  The shared experience should always come first because in serving team performance, it also drives individual goals and outcomes.

I'm not going to tell others which team culture is best; it's highly flexible, and it's in the nature of culture that the individuals involved must define it.  I am going to say, though, that you can't go wrong by including enjoyment as a primary goal.  With the goal of enjoying the experience, we can frame effective training prescriptions and structures.  We also plan for positive thoughts and moods, and I probably don't need to say how useful these are.  Enjoyment also guides the behaviour of individual team members, and it can be used to define acceptable and unacceptable behaviour without entering the murky waters of relationships.  It's a proactive ingredient in building team culture.

The final point I am going to make about building team culture is the role and importance of a 'full value' contract, which implies that individual team members must participate fully in the agreed culture.  Values hold little power if they're not shared, and sharing occurs when individuals participate.  A small step that I believe helps at this point, is to present the team values and the idea of the contract to parents.  Parents play a critical role in team culture via reinforcement of behaviours.  Where parents understand what's expected (of individuals) it is simply more likely that ideas and messages communicated to their children are consistent with the agreed team values.

Rather than hoping for a cohesive and successful team performance, we can help children understand what it means to be a good team member.  We can give them the agency to determine what matters in their sporting experience.