TEAM spirit has proved to be an important ingredient that drives athletes to reach greater heights in their quest for glory.
In sports, this technique or characteristic has from time immemorial been used to inspire confidence in athletes before and during competitions.
Many are times when people talk about individual brilliance as being the key to success but to the contrary, team spirit is a key. Individual brilliance should be part of team spirit if any group should in any way aspire to win accolades.
Team spirit is all about pursuing a common goal, supporting the team, respecting others and most of all encouraging team mates.
Some scholars have gone a step further by breaking down the acronyms TEAM SPIRIT to the meanings:
T stands for Trying your best, E for Encouraging others within the team, A for Achieving your set targets, M stands for Must always show team spirit while S is for Supporting other team members, P for participating, I for it’s impossible to win if members have no team spirit, R for Respect, I stands for it’s important to have a go and T is for togetherness.
Team spirit in sports is an essential element that demands teamwork. The team requires the efforts of all players to attain success. A good team spirit means that players have a good and positive attitude during competitions.
The importance of team spirit cannot be overlooked because it helps to get teams pumped up during games. If a team is down at the end of a game, sometimes a bit of team spirit is all that is needed to turn the game around.
It creates the unity in the team and improves the input of each player. If embraced, it plays a key role in preventing the misunderstandings that may arise in the team as results of a defeat.
In most instances, players tend to point fingers at each when they team fails to perform as expected and this has a negative effect on the mentality of the individual players. But with team spirit, the players learn to face highs and lows as a collective entity.
The recently crowned Africa champions, Ivory Coast applied a great deal of team spirit at the just ended Equatorial Guinea 2015 edition of the Africa Cup of Nations.
After several unsuccessful attempts, in the past decades, they finally landed the continent’s most prestigious football trophy, for the second time in the country’s history all because of team spirit.
By all measure, Ivory Coast has some of the best players on the continent, most of whom ply their trade in the European elite leagues but in the past few years they couldn’t manage to mint silverware despite possessing all the skill and talent to win owing to lack of team spirit.
During the 2015 AFCON, one could attest to the fact that this current Ivorian team showed unity of purpose right from the start of the tournament up to the final game and their triumph didn’t come as a surprise to this author, in simple words, it was meant to be.
Today, the sports environment is increasingly becoming volatile because teams, regardless of the level of competition, are pre-occupied with winning.
Indeed, winning is a driving force that should compel our technical personnel in various sports disciplines to prepare athletes adequately for competitions, both mentally and physically.
In the face of disarray, the coaches have the responsibility to build stability and adaptive capacity by forging a sense of community. Behind every successful team, is good coach. Therefore, coaches have a critical role to play in instilling team spirit in their players.
Once a sense of community is established in the team, each player gets to understand the team’s roles, standards and identity and this helps them to see how they should internally relate to and connect with each other.
In any competitive sport, strategy, understanding the competition and strong technical talent are keys to success. However, the momentum can shift at any moment, and when that happens, an intense uncertainty exists throughout the entire game.
In such instances, the team’s abilities to adapt to constant change and operate in unstable environments are decisive factors for winning.
The coaches or trainers must therefore strive to build unshakable team spirit amongst their players. The following are some tips one can use to achieve unshakable team spirit:
Language: Players need to feel special, valued and respected. Coaches should take the time to talk to each player one-on-one and then address the squad as a whole.
Positive language is paramount if the coach has to get instructions across, and make sure everyone understands their job and feels confident about winning a competition.
The mentor must allow his or her players a lee way to express themselves freely but within the scope of a team’s tactics.
Avoid blame culture: A coach must at all times pick out the details of a bad result and move on very, very quickly. They must do the best they can in the next training session or the next game after coming off the back of a good or bad result.
Winning Atmosphere: Many coaches have applied this aspect very well within their team. This author has never heard of a coach, who would tell their players to just ‘play and enjoy the game’. Every coach beams with confidence even when winning a particular game is far from being attainable.
A coach must give the players everything they need to improve and collectively, they will want to better themselves and they will aspire to win the top prize.
Embrace Experience: Keeping old players or ‘tired legs’ as they are commonly referred to in football, boosts morale in the team.
Having them behind the team is very significant to team spirit because it enable the gradual transfer of expertise to young ones.
Value every player: The players who are not in the team are, to some extent, more important than the ones who are in it. At some point the coach would need them to be right, physically and mentally, hence the need to accord every player individual attention.
It is also crucial for the coach to create an atmosphere where every player, especially those that left out of the team to feel they are part of it.
As the teams prepare for battle, it is important for the coaches to inculcate team spirit in every player, only then can we achieve peak performance.
For comments: moseschimfwembe@gmail.com