Team Culture - If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

Culture is a term that is very overused and abused in team sports, and in American work/professional/corporate places. Everybody wants good culture, nobody wants bad culture, duh. What does that mean though, and who is the judge of good culture? 

I think that in general, most people can tell on a surface level whether this or that team culture is healthy or not. Maybe not instantly, you might need to be exposed to it for a long period of time, but you generally can't hide bad culture. I bet you can dress it up and make it look nice for a period of time, but that's one of the important points - healthy culture is sustained over long periods of time. It's handed down from group to group. What that requires is belief in a set of values that you use to drive what your culture is, and continuous analysis of your current collective behavior against those values. You are never done setting the standard. 

In the context of team sports, team culture is not slogans and exercises that come solely from the head coach - it is the vision from head coach, agreed upon by the rest of the leaders on the team (assistant coaches and captains) and modeled by everybody. It is how we act and how we do what we do. 

It is extremely important for a few reasons

• We want teenagers doing extra curricular activities. It is healthy for them to do things in a group setting.

• We want to give them reasons to try their best at whatever they're doing.

• They have options! If you want your team to succeed, they need a reason to be there. 

So what can you do to develop your team's culture? Here is the basic list of things I do to keep the BCTF ship afloat and moving in the right direction. 

For context, a little about my team. I took over in 2019, the year that Byron Center moved from Division II to Division I in the state tournament. A few years previously, the boys won a DII State Title and many school records had been set in the previous coaching regime. But to quote Coach Reinstein (my predecessor), he "squeezed just about everything he could out of that team" and the boys were essentially on complete reset. In practical terms, it was a team with a moderate amount of talent who did not know how to be a good track and field team, and it was just bumped up to the highest division in the state. My first year, our girls and boys went winless in duals, finished second to last and last in the conference, and finished last, and 14th at our regional final, failing to qualify any athletes for the state finals. 

Fast forward to 2023 and the boys won our conference and finished 6th at regionals (behind 3 teams that finished in the top 9 in the state). The girls finished 7th at regionals, and we qualified 7 athletes for the state finals. While these aren't crazy numbers, the point is, the team has improved steadily and consistently, and we have gone from a team that was seen as participatory to an extremely competitive team that people are excited about in the school. 

Here are the things that I prioritize. 

1) Know every kids name. 

Lots of coaches out there who "aren't good with names." I think that the simplest thing you can do to make a kid feel like they belong is to learn every name. I make it a goal to know all the new kids by the end of the first week, and not to have to ask them their name more than twice. 

Do you need to have the same relationship with every single kid? No, that's just impossible. And some kids don't put enough effort into being a good teammate to merit all that time from you, but bare minimum, know their name. 

2) Talk to as many of them as possible as often as possible.

This is where the second half of the first point comes into practice. I believe coaching is about relationships. Want them to care enough about being on your team to give you the necessary effort? Do what you can to get to know them. Doesn't mean you need to have deep pointed conversations daily, there are some simple things you can do like, walk up and down the warmup lines at the beginning of practice. Visit different event groups when your event group isn't in the middle of a hard workout that you need your eyes on. Watch them at meets, and ask them about their performance as often as possible. 

3) Set, model, and uphold team expectations. 

This is where much of the culture work happens. I think expectations are what most people are really talking about when they talk about team culture. There are two types of expectations to talk about. First, there should be clear expectations for what it takes to receive your varsity letter. Our Varsity standard is the Conference Meet team. That basically means, if you are top 4 in your event group, you earn your varsity letter. We have a secondary set of time/distance standards for if any event group is particularly deep. 

The other expectations can be summed up with the statement "What is the minimum expectation of behavior that you must follow to be on this team?"

I see coaches (rightfully) complaining about student athletes that don't treat T&F with the respect that it deserves. Whether they are padding their high school resume, or trying to use a sport to get out of a PE credit, or their parents signed them up, there are always kids that don't want to be there. How do you deal with them, especially if you're in a No Cut situation? Create clear expectations that if you want to be on this team, this is how you act. We show up to practice, we do the work, we respect coaches, teammates and competitors, we do our best. 

I believe that (and have seen in action) if you communicate, model, and uphold your behavioral expectations, the kids who can't handle it and don't respect it will self-select out. 

4) Team captains.

Good team captains are required in order to model and uphold those expectations, and lots of them are necessary on a big track team. I have a team of about 80-90 boys and 60-70 girls. I want 15-20 captains in order to keep a team that size in order. I also want a cross section of the team with representation from all grade levels, boys and girls, and all event groups. How do they get picked? It isn't just the first kids to lead the team breakdown or the most popular or just the fastest or strongest. About midway through the season, I start asking assistant coaches and the current captains who they think deserve to be elected a captain for the next season, and I ask them blindly, not as a group. The group of names that comes up is almost always pretty unanimous. 

5) Celebrate everybody. 

Performance is important. If you want your team to be successful and to be taken seriously, you need to perform. Celebrating the stars is easy and happens naturally. Celebrating the JV kids is another way to show them they matter and get them to buy in. Besides communicating that every PR should be celebrated, I like to pick some numbers that I want everybody to shoot for in their HS career. For instance, I love pumping up my distance runner boys to break 5 minutes in the 1600, and make it clear that if the entire group breaks 6 minutes by the end of the year, we are going to be good. Whatever your event group or performance level for your school's demographic is, pick some benchmark numbers and get your younger kids to set some goals. 

6) Social media.

How do you celebrate people? Besides shouting them out the practice after a meet, social media is the best marketing tool you can have right now. I run a team instagram and facebook, and share the meet summary posts to our booster club facebook. 

It is easier than ever to post professional looking social media content, and I think the better the posts look, the more serious you will be taken by kids and parents in the school and community. I'm lucky to have a wife who is a photographer and graphic designer, so I don't have to do a TON of work in season if I give her a list of pre-meet posts, but with the website Canva, it's easy to create a good looking template to use for meet results, PRs, senior highlights, or anything else you can think of. Kids are even a resource you can use for this if you give them firm parameters for what graphics should look like. However - I would not let a student run the account itself, and it should be clear that any communication from that account should be something you are comfortable sharing with your administrator. 

7) Get in the school. 

Getting a teaching job in the school was a game changer for me, but that's not possible for everybody. There are plenty of other ways to get involved in the school community like attending other games/contests, asking your AD if there are side jobs they need help with at big games, volunteering in the concession stand, and taking full advantage of whatever you are allowed to do for offseason training. 

8) S&C and offseason.

This will vary from school to school and state to state, but to be good at the high school level, your athletes need to train year round. If my kids are in other sports, that's cool with me. I will see you when your season is done. But coming back to the word expectations, they need to know that if they expect to be good at what they do, then they do have to work for it year round. It goes without saying that whatever offseason or preseason work you do must follow your state associations rules, and it cannot be compulsory. What I have found is following rules is way easier than complaining about them, and when kids like being on your team, getting them to workout in the offseason is very easy. They love it. 

If you have an in house strength and conditioning coach, become their best buddy. S&C coaches get a bad rap for only caring about football or basketball, but if you invest your time into learning strength and conditioning, they will invest their energy into helping your team. If there is an offseason athletes program, pick a day of the week and show up every week. If there is a summer program, do the same thing. Get in the weight room so all of the athletes in the school can see that you care. 

9) For the teachers - open up your classroom. 

I saw this on twitter a few weeks ago. If kids are coming to your classroom to just hang out, that's a really good thing. 

10) Hire good assistants. 

Last but not least. This is incredibly important. Hire people that are good at what they do, share in your vision, care about coaching kids to be good humans, and that you (hopefully) like being around. 

Don't just hire buddies, hire good people. Hiring is hard, I've done it on a yearly basis since I started coaching at BC. But good assistants are necessary for good team culture. Do you need to agree on every little detail? No, that's simply never going to happen. But you all need to be pulling in the same direction. What do you do about a coach you hired who turns out to be a bad fit? Make the job description clear. All of my coaches get a job description written by me on a school letterhead with their duties and responsibilities, along with a coaches creed that they must agree to.

Above all else, be yourself. Don't fake it, and make it a place they want to be. 

My first line at every parent meeting is "I want every kid to leave this team saying 'I'm glad I did that'." 

I think that if you can get that part right, a lot of the other things seem to fall into place.