March 6, 2017
The Culture Journey Week #22 – Defining Who We Are
Week 22
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Regular Season week #1
Positive Energy
I continued what I have affectionately self-named ‘Coach Craig’s Goofy Games‘ to start each practice.
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This week’s best game:Towel Tug-of-War King-of-the-Mountain Style
We repeated the towel tug of war game I have previously described (to see the details click here), but this time we did it king of the mountain style. I sorted our roster by approximate size and weight and put them in ascending order so we started with the smallest 3 athletes first. Then whoever won got to stay and we brought in the next 2 kids. So if you kept winning you remained king of the mountain. It’s always fun to see surprising kids step up, we had one of our first year players win 5 matches in a row at one point.
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Culture Update – Defining Who We Are
This week was quite a roller-coaster ride on our culture journey. It started with a game last Saturday that was quite embarrassing to be part of. We played selfishly, we played recklessly, and we got in a fight which included one player from each team getting ejected. But instead of letting this define us, we used it to fuel a heart-to-heart with our team at practice on Monday. We discussed whether we wanted to be known for being a chippy scrappy team that easily lost their focus, or whether we wanted to be known for being a smart, aggressive, great lacrosse team that respects the game and their opponents. We tied in our ROOTS core values and discussed respect for the officials and opponents particularly. It was a great discussion, but of course you always wonder who much of it will actually play out when push comes to shove in a game.
We had our next game on Wednesday. We won a hard-fought game against a solid opponent 6-5. We only had 1 or 2 penalties, we played unselfishly, and we respected the officials and opponents. What a turnaround in one game. Maybe we needed everything to go wrong in that first game to see the picture of what we don’t want to represent.It did, and we will continue to use that as a reminder that we have to be continually focusing on our respect for our ROOTS values.
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We also continue to have the seniors presenting 2 of the teammate tips from Jon Gordon’s The Hard Hat, this weeks we covered points 5 and 6:
5 – Share Positive Contagious Energy
6 – Don’t complain
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Have a great week and keep fighting for your culture everyday!
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I am excited to walk this journey with you. I welcome any feedback, ideas, and suggestions you might have as you read through this. You are also welcome to share this with any other coaches you think could benefit from it, and please have them email me at [email protected] if they would like to be added to this email list.
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If you are interested in diving deeper on building culture we have started a mastermind group that meets the first and third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 pm EST, see the details at: winningyouthcoaching.com/the-culture-bus-mastermind/. It is exciting to be with likeminded world-changers.
