As a freshman, I was on my Junior Colleges basketball team. The team was made up of various personalities and had a split ratio of freshman and sophomore students.
The inputs to the team would be the teammates whose focus was on becoming better collectively and not clashing with each other. We had to create a good group dynamic where every contributed their part, worked hard, got better, and helped each other. Before the season it is the goal of the coach to gain new recruits through send information about the team and naturally it would look better if the team was doing good to appeal to the recruit. My year was the best year as far as the team producing the outputs or recruits. There were 8 freshman that came in with me that could all play well and brought different attributes to the court such as having strong shooting, rebounding, defense, and awareness on the court. In order to get a good recruiting class the coach went down the New York City and other areas to recruit and brought kids up to play and see the campus and interact with the current players.
With everyone having different knowledge and experience of the game and everyone not being allstars are group dynamic came into place in a positive way. During most of the season we went undefeated and were top 10 in the nation. The different skills and diversity played a positive role in making sure that everyone worked hard. Our task was to win as many games as possible and win a championship. We did well during that process but during that process each member had to practice, get better, maintain grades, and work as a team. That didn't happen at the end of the season so we ended up losing to teams that we had already beaten.
The campus was small and most of my teammates lived in the same dorm so we had a high level of frequency and interaction. As far as proximity, everyone was within a five minute walk to each other and when their was information that had to get to everyone at once or the team photo needed to be sent to everyone, it was sent via email that went from the coaches to the players. Our collaboration happened on the court where we had to figure out what we needed to do to win the next game. As long as each player played their roles, committed to the group, and maintained not only our infrastructure and grades, then the team met the members needs. We had a great season although we fell short of the championship where everyone did not conform to each other and segregate into different groups but socialized and worked hard as a team.
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It’s interesting that you mention keeping up grades, which at first seems orthogonal to the primary task of winning a championship. In this case, each member of the group has the personal goal of maintaining his own grades, in addition to the collective goal of winning basketball games. One might draw a fuzzy analogy to the prisoner’s dilemma here, in that if everyone chooses to focus on schoolwork at the expense of practice, the team as a whole will suffer.
ReplyDeleteThis is a relevant blog to me because I played basketball as well and dealt with many of these same issues. For the inputs were there any tools or technologies used? My team sometimes watched video on opposing teams or on potential recruits to see their strengths and weaknesses as an individual and with how this would fit into the whole. I also agree that the interaction process and how you work together has a drastic effect on the team’s performance. Team captain roles need to be established to ensure a positive team environment.
ReplyDeleteI really like this post Mike. My post was about being on the football team here at Cornell, so I really understand what it's like to be part of the input, go through the process, and hopefully have a great output. I know it's junior college so you guys only play for two years with each other, but do you think you guys could have played longer with one another had it been a 4 year college or was the gropu dynamic just not there?
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