By Ed Piper
I've been thinking about this since the other day: In your garden-variety team sport, if you have individuals who look grim-faced and don't talk with the others, you're going to have a tense bunch of individuals and, more importantly, the team will likely end up playing tight and not performing as well as it could have.
You need someone who is a joiner, a connector, a talker and/or a joker who lightens the mood, gets teammates rubbing elbows with one another, and loosens them up.
The difference this makes can be the difference from being wiped out by a poor performance, and playing with freedom and abandon.
Having played a zillion games in team sports when I was young as well as in high school and community college, I have seen visually and felt kinesthetically what team camaraderie is like. Synergy among humans is real: We're made as social animals, and we play off the emotions, moods, and actions--as well as the words--of those around us.
Now, focus the situation into high school sports, and you have student athletes who are juggling the joint demands of class assignments, homework, responsibilities at home, in addition to their obligations to the team. When we're adolescents, we are riding the wave of developing bodies, hormones, reactions to others' comments--a whole swirl of things as we journey and explore who we are.
Everybody, at all stages of life, needs a support system. But in the case of teens, I remember a Viking football game in which a kicker completely shanked one of his efforts. They brought him back to the bench as he was swooning, and it turned out he hadn't eaten the whole day that Friday, and as a result he felt horrible physically.
He had gotten so caught up in the tests, homework to turn in, as well as the lead-up to that Friday night's game, that he had forgotten to eat.
Mainly, what he had needed during the day at school--was someone to remind him to have a bite to eat.
Well, back in our maelstrom of emotions in the team room, or out on the course... Many people are private. They're quiet. That's good, and healthy. It's especially understandable when you have a big match, and team members become solemn outwardly as they digest the competition that they are going to face out there on the field of battle.
This is exactly where you need the guy who, to some, seems totally inappropriate in the way he makes light of the whole situation. It lets the tension in the room dissipate. Make a joke. Talk about something totally unrelated to the game that's about to start--like how Joey in class spurted fruit juice out of his mouth by accident, and it went all over his paper, and everybody cracked up.
When my father Ed Sr. was ill with melanoma cancer, one nurse, Dottie, made the whole thing liveable. She would come into his hospital room, where he was confined the last week and a half of his life before dying of the gruesome disease, and she would immediately get people to snap to by barking out comments, cutting right through the thick air that we family members were sinking under.
She provided a respite from the ghastly thoughts of woe we were having. She made jokes. She interacted with Dad, who had gone from his giant-body 240 pounds down to 170 or something over a period of months, and it helped us all move around, take notice, and get out of our doldrums. We all loved Dad like crazy, but we were acting like we had lived the worst lives in history and we had no joy.
Dottie the oncology nurse gave us joy.
And that's what key teammates do in the heat of battle: They spread joy among their compadres, enabling and empowering them to do the things in competition that they do best--strike the ball, block the ball, tackle people, hit a round object (a baseball) with another round object (a bat), an extremely difficult thing to do, or whatever else the skills required in that particular sport require.
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