Team culture takes the combined effort of coaches and players. In this blog, volleyball coach Lindsay Peterson explains how coaches can start building the right traditions.

I’ll never forget my first collegiate volleyball game. It was the first time I’d been through the actual warm-up with the team. We did all the normal things; warm up our arms, pepper, work on team defense, etc. 

Then right before our time was done, the seniors pulled us into the huddle and told us there was a chant we always did before every match. A cheer that started off just a whisper and ended as a scream by the end. A cheer that in few words described just how good we thought we were. 

This chant was a ritual—it never changed. Game after game, we spoke those words. It was exhilarating, it made my blood pump, my heart race, and let me know that we were all in this together.

I look back at the moment and realize the complexity of that simple cheer. It was tied to every game in the years I was in that program, including a Division II national title, countless wins and broken records. It’s important to have these positive traditions in your program, whether it’s cheers, chants, dirty sock rituals or the thousands of other things your team could do to get excited about games. I’m a firm believer in positive traditions + positive leadership = positive team culture.

There are two sides to my team’s culture: how the coach and staff build traditions to facilitate positive culture, and how team leaders help establish that culture. In this first blog, I’ll focus on the coaches’ side.

Pre-Season

I had a coach tell me once to always work players extremely hard in your first practice of the year, then at the end of that practice ask them what they want to be known for. I tried it and the results were great. 

Kids are eager to tell you what they think. Now for us, winning and losing isn’t who we are. The things we stand for and how hard we’re willing to work, that’s who we are. Having my players establish “who we are,” and what we want to be known for, is imperative for us to begin our season. 

Most of my teams agree on something close to the same thing every year: tenacious, relentless, competitive, a never-give-up attitude, hard-working, hard to defend, supportive, etc.  Every year will be different because each year’s team is different. Even your leadership might change. But you can sustain team culture in your gym by establishing who you are. 

During the Season

As the season begins and then progresses, make sure you’re establishing consistencies. For instance, before every home match, my team comes in early and sets up the nets. Then they spend the next 30 minutes serving and passing. 

It’s also a tradition for the team to gather at my house twice a year for “practice.” We play games, eat snacks and watch motivational movies. Other traditions could be team dinners, team-building days, themed practices, program game days. There’s a plethora of inexpensive, or even free, activities for your players to participate in that are beneficial for your team culture. 

Make these activities sustainable and worthwhile, and plan them in advance so it’s easy to stick to them.

Post-Season  

The end of the year is almost as important as the beginning. To make sure the culture you’ve been building all year will carry on, use your banquet to remind your players of all the things they accomplished throughout the year. You could even use awards to emphasize what’s most important for a positive culture. 

At Millard North, we give out the Mustang Award to the player who has put in the work and never gave up during hardships. The best part of this award is that it usually winds up being a kid who doesn’t always get the “clout.” 

For example, one year it was a middle who started in the first 25 matches of the year. She replaced an injured Division I hitter, worked incredibly hard, and we went undefeated during the time she started. When it was time for the injured player to come back, she didn’t give up. She continued to give it her all, became a leader on the practice side, and pushed us to be the best we could be. She gave herself completely and didn’t complain one time! That’s why this award is so important to me and to my program culture. 

Positive team culture is a direct reflection of the leadership provided by your coaching staff. Find ways to promote culture on your court and in your program. The long-lasting benefits will be worth all your time and effort.

Lind­say Peter­son has been a var­si­ty head coach for eight years. She played for the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Alaba­ma, help­ing them win the DII Nation­al Cham­pi­onship in 2003. Peter­son has led her Mil­lard North High School team to the state cham­pi­onship tour­na­ment sev­en times, win­ning in 2016 and 2018. She was named one of the top 40 coach­es in the coun­try by the AVCA, and Coach of the Year by the Oma­ha World-Herald.

Building your athletic department brand is the first step in creating state cham­pi­onship-caliber programs. These principles can help you get started.

Seventeen years ago, when I started at Springfield Central High School as an assistant principal, we had one of the lowest performing athletic programs in the Western Massachusetts region and one of the largest student bodies in the Commonwealth. 

There’s plenty of proud history at this inner-city school—our gym not only displays state title banners, but also the jerseys of past alums who made it to the NBA and MLB. However, the school was in the midst of a dramatic downturn in athletic success and there was little to boast about when I arrived.

Fast forward nearly two decades. Across the board, our teams are some of the most competitive in our state’s highest level. Our boys’ and girls’ basketball teams routinely reach the final weekend of postseason. Our wrestling program often wins state championships, and our football team is now considered one of the most powerful in New England. During live recruiting periods, coaches from the Big Ten, ACC, Ivy, and Patriot Leagues visit our school. 

In 2018 our football team became the first to win a statewide MIAA football championship in Western Mass.

The turning point? Our brand. Building it has been a slow, methodical process with many bumps along the way, and we continue to work hard at it every day of the year. But it’s also been a tremendous learning opportunity, with the benefits far exceeding our expectations. 

If you’re about to start your own brand-building journey, keep these principles in mind.

You can’t do it alone.

A team of like-minded people working alongside you is key to your initiative. I was lucky to have an administrative colleague share my views about the potential of our brand. 

Together, we systematically made decisions that helped us gain traction towards our ultimate goal. We scrutinized every hire and tried to find individuals that were excellent in the classroom and accomplished coaches.  

As a rule, we hire people, not resumes. Some of the most successful, effective, and influential people in our building started off as uncertified teachers working towards their advanced degrees. And any time we get a chance to hire an alumni, we do. We believe they have an intrinsic loyalty to the school and can relate to our current students. Our goal is to create a family atmosphere.  

Bottom line—it takes a village. Find someone with like minded views to help you kick-start your goals. 

The best ability? Repeatability.

We created a school motto that we could take immense pride in, “Home to Scholars and Champions.” Years ago, we noticed a school from the West Coast had a similar motto and was extremely successful for its area. Their students were no different than ours, so we thought, “If that school could manifest their own destiny, why not us?” Our motto was born and we never stopped pushing it.

Seventeen years later, “Home to Scholars and Champions” is what people know us by. We’ve tagged it everywhere we could—our stationary, our hallways, our gymnasium wall—and every time students underperform, we point out our motto is the expectation. 

This catchy, repeatable motto is relative to almost anything in life. A scholar-athlete is more specific to the classroom, but a champion is a champion in life. 

Combine consistency and creativity.

As part of our process, we realized our school’s logo needed an upgrade. Two of our most dynamic coaches came up with the solution.

Our current football coach took over a decade ago and wanted to create a unique identity for us. He created our “C” logo, an inverted two-tone twist on the University of Miami’s iconic “U” logo. All of our sports teams use the “C” in their uniforms. When anyone sees our gear, they immediately know it’s Springfield Central. 

Meanwhile, our wrestling coach had been toying with another logo with our mascot, the Golden Eagles. So we combined that eagle with our “C” to create a fierce logo, a singular identity. This new logo will adorn our newly-renovated basketball court starting in the 19-20 school year.

One logo for all the teams strengthens our brand.

Rally the community.

When you’re an inner city school, everything that goes wrong in the city gets equated with the school system. It’s a tough reputation to shed. As hard as we tried, people just didn’t find academic success that interesting. It’s hard to get the attention of the media from a positive perspective. 

But when you have an athletic win, they’re almost forced to put it in the paper. And our brand could be out in the community in a positive way.

It’s amazing how many people will stop you on the street to say, “Hey, you’re having a great year.” They have no idea what you’re doing academically, but when they see your name in the paper for athletics, it connects positive thoughts to your school.

I recently researched how many times our athletic teams garnered headlines in a local news outlet versus how many times we were mentioned for academic reasons. The ratio was 97 to 1. When we quantified this with a projected advertising cost, it equated to tens of thousands of dollars.

We’ve been fortunate to get the full support of our city’s political community. They want to see us be successful academically and socially, and our positive identity allows us to get the support we need. 

You’ll see them at games—our mayor, our superintendent, school committee members, city councilors—cheering for us, proud of us. It drives home that what we do as an athletic department is important. 

We also try to bring back alumni as much as possible. Travis Best, who was a McDonald’s All-American a quarter-century ago at Central and went on to great success in the NBA, can always be found in our stands when he’s in town. His jersey is the only retired number for any of our athletic programs. 

Every year we hear stories from students who have dreamed about becoming a Central High School Golden Eagle. It’s a great feeling to know your school is providing amazing academic and co-curricular opportunities for students who are historically disadvantaged. We’ve even had students turn down full-scholarship opportunities from prep schools to become part of our community. 

We don’t have all of the answers but we hope to continue to improve, grow and develop. Resources like this blog can help us, and other schools across the country, share ideas and best practices to ensure positive experiences and future opportunities for student-athletes everywhere. 

Tad Tokarz has been a high school administrator for 18 years, working his entire career in an urban district. He also teaches adjunct classes focused on educational leadership, special education and professional development at American International College.

Team culture takes the combined effort of coaches and players. In this blog, volleyball coach Lindsay Peterson explains how coaches can start building the right traditions.

I’ll never forget my first collegiate volleyball game. It was the first time I’d been through the actual warm-up with the team. We did all the normal things; warm up our arms, pepper, work on team defense, etc. 

Then right before our time was done, the seniors pulled us into the huddle and told us there was a chant we always did before every match. A cheer that started off just a whisper and ended as a scream by the end. A cheer that in few words described just how good we thought we were. 

This chant was a ritual—it never changed. Game after game, we spoke those words. It was exhilarating, it made my blood pump, my heart race, and let me know that we were all in this together.

I look back at the moment and realize the complexity of that simple cheer. It was tied to every game in the years I was in that program, including a Division II national title, countless wins and broken records. It’s important to have these positive traditions in your program, whether it’s cheers, chants, dirty sock rituals or the thousands of other things your team could do to get excited about games. I’m a firm believer in positive traditions + positive leadership = positive team culture.

There are two sides to my team’s culture: how the coach and staff build traditions to facilitate positive culture, and how team leaders help establish that culture. In this first blog, I’ll focus on the coaches’ side. 

Pre-Season

I had a coach tell me once to always work players extremely hard in your first practice of the year, then at the end of that practice ask them what they want to be known for. I tried it and the results were great. 

Kids are eager to tell you what they think. Now for us, winning and losing isn’t who we are. The things we stand for and how hard we’re willing to work, that’s who we are. Having my players establish “who we are,” and what we want to be known for, is imperative for us to begin our season. 

Most of my teams agree on something close to the same thing every year: tenacious, relentless, competitive, a never-give-up attitude, hard-working, hard to defend, supportive, etc.  Every year will be different because each year’s team is different. Even your leadership might change. But you can sustain team culture in your gym by establishing who you are. 

During the Season

As the season begins and then progresses, make sure you’re establishing consistencies. For instance, before every home match, my team comes in early and sets up the nets. Then they spend the next 30 minutes serving and passing. 

It’s also a tradition for the team to gather at my house twice a year for “practice.” We play games, eat snacks and watch motivational movies. Other traditions could be team dinners, team-building days, themed practices, program game days. There’s a plethora of inexpensive, or even free, activities for your players to participate in that are beneficial for your team culture. 

Make these activities sustainable and worthwhile, and plan them in advance so it’s easy to stick to them.

Post-Season  

The end of the year is almost as important as the beginning. To make sure the culture you’ve been building all year will carry on, use your banquet to remind your players of all the things they accomplished throughout the year. You could even use awards to emphasize what’s most important for a positive culture. 

At Millard North, we give out the Mustang Award to the player who has put in the work and never gave up during hardships. The best part of this award is that it usually winds up being a kid who doesn’t always get the “clout.” 

For example, one year it was a middle who started in the first 25 matches of the year. She replaced an injured Division I hitter, worked incredibly hard, and we went undefeated during the time she started. When it was time for the injured player to come back, she didn’t give up. She continued to give it her all, became a leader on the practice side, and pushed us to be the best we could be. She gave herself completely and didn’t complain one time! That’s why this award is so important to me and to my program culture. 

Positive team culture is a direct reflection of the leadership provided by your coaching staff. Find ways to promote culture on your court and in your program. The long-lasting benefits will be worth all your time and effort.

Lind­say Peter­son has been a var­si­ty head coach for eight years. She played for the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Alaba­ma, help­ing them win the DII Nation­al Cham­pi­onship in 2003. Peter­son has led her Mil­lard North High School team to the state cham­pi­onship tour­na­ment sev­en times, win­ning in 2016 and 2018. She was named one of the top 40 coach­es in the coun­try by the AVCA, and Coach of the Year by the Oma­ha World-Herald.

Building your athletic department brand is the first step in creating state cham­pi­onship-caliber programs. These principles can help you get started.

This article was written by Tad Tokarz who has been a high school administrator for 18 years, working his entire career in an urban district. He also teaches adjunct classes focused on educational leadership, special education and professional development at American International College.

Seventeen years ago, when I started at Springfield Central High School as an assistant principal, we had one of the lowest performing athletic programs in the Western Massachusetts region and one of the largest student bodies in the Commonwealth. 

There’s plenty of proud history at this inner-city school—our gym not only displays state title banners, but also the jerseys of past alums who made it to the NBA and MLB. However, the school was in the midst of a dramatic downturn in athletic success and there was little to boast about when I arrived.

Fast forward nearly two decades. Across the board, our teams are some of the most competitive in our state’s highest level. Our boys’ and girls’ basketball teams routinely reach the final weekend of postseason. Our wrestling program often wins state championships, and our football team is now considered one of the most powerful in New England. During live recruiting periods, coaches from the Big Ten, ACC, Ivy, and Patriot Leagues visit our school. 

In 2018 our football team became the first to win a statewide MIAA football championship in Western Mass.

The turning point? Our brand. Building it has been a slow, methodical process with many bumps along the way, and we continue to work hard at it every day of the year. But it’s also been a tremendous learning opportunity, with the benefits far exceeding our expectations. 

If you’re about to start your own brand-building journey, keep these principles in mind.

You can’t do it alone.

A team of like-minded people working alongside you is key to your initiative. I was lucky to have an administrative colleague share my views about the potential of our brand. 

Together, we systematically made decisions that helped us gain traction towards our ultimate goal. We scrutinized every hire and tried to find individuals that were excellent in the classroom and accomplished coaches.  

As a rule, we hire people, not resumes. Some of the most successful, effective, and influential people in our building started off as uncertified teachers working towards their advanced degrees. And any time we get a chance to hire an alumni, we do. We believe they have an intrinsic loyalty to the school and can relate to our current students. Our goal is to create a family atmosphere.  

Bottom line—it takes a village. Find someone with like minded views to help you kick-start your goals. 

The best ability? Repeatability.

We created a school motto that we could take immense pride in, “Home to Scholars and Champions.” Years ago, we noticed a school from the West Coast had a similar motto and was extremely successful for its area. Their students were no different than ours, so we thought, “If that school could manifest their own destiny, why not us?” Our motto was born and we never stopped pushing it.

Seventeen years later, “Home to Scholars and Champions” is what people know us by. We’ve tagged it everywhere we could—our stationary, our hallways, our gymnasium wall—and every time students underperform, we point out our motto is the expectation. 

This catchy, repeatable motto is relative to almost anything in life. A scholar-athlete is more specific to the classroom, but a champion is a champion in life. 

Combine consistency and creativity.

As part of our process, we realized our school’s logo needed an upgrade. Two of our most dynamic coaches came up with the solution.

Our current football coach took over a decade ago and wanted to create a unique identity for us. He created our “C” logo, an inverted two-tone twist on the University of Miami’s iconic “U” logo. All of our sports teams use the “C” in their uniforms. When anyone sees our gear, they immediately know it’s Springfield Central. 

Meanwhile, our wrestling coach had been toying with another logo with our mascot, the Golden Eagles. So we combined that eagle with our “C” to create a fierce logo, a singular identity. This new logo will adorn our newly-renovated basketball court starting in the 19-20 school year.

One logo for all the teams strengthens our brand.

Rally the community.

When you’re an inner city school, everything that goes wrong in the city gets equated with the school system. It’s a tough reputation to shed. As hard as we tried, people just didn’t find academic success that interesting. It’s hard to get the attention of the media from a positive perspective. 

But when you have an athletic win, they’re almost forced to put it in the paper. And our brand could be out in the community in a positive way.

It’s amazing how many people will stop you on the street to say, “Hey, you’re having a great year.” They have no idea what you’re doing academically, but when they see your name in the paper for athletics, it connects positive thoughts to your school.

I recently researched how many times our athletic teams garnered headlines in a local news outlet versus how many times we were mentioned for academic reasons. The ratio was 97 to 1. When we quantified this with a projected advertising cost, it equated to tens of thousands of dollars.

We’ve been fortunate to get the full support of our city’s political community. They want to see us be successful academically and socially, and our positive identity allows us to get the support we need. 

You’ll see them at games—our mayor, our superintendent, school committee members, city councilors—cheering for us, proud of us. It drives home that what we do as an athletic department is important. 

We also try to bring back alumni as much as possible. Travis Best, who was a McDonald’s All-American a quarter-century ago at Central and went on to great success in the NBA, can always be found in our stands when he’s in town. His jersey is the only retired number for any of our athletic programs. 

Every year we hear stories from students who have dreamed about becoming a Central High School Golden Eagle. It’s a great feeling to know your school is providing amazing academic and co-curricular opportunities for students who are historically disadvantaged. We’ve even had students turn down full-scholarship opportunities from prep schools to become part of our community. 

We don’t have all of the answers but we hope to continue to improve, grow and develop. Resources like this blog can help us, and other schools across the country, share ideas and best practices to ensure positive experiences and future opportunities for student-athletes everywhere.

Two years after landing the head coaching position he so badly desired, Coach Jones (not his real name) was quietly fired. The administrative staff realized they’d made a mistake hiring Jones. They weren’t quite sure why he didn’t work out. They did their homework.

Well, enough to consider him a solution to their coaching needs. However, what they couldn’t see is what did him in. After spending a month analyzing Jones, here are the flaws I uncovered:

• Is overly demanding
• Doesn’t listen
• Is intolerant of dissent
• Takes the credit for success
• Blames others for mistakes
• Is untrustworthy—doesn’t do what he says he’ll do
• Is aloof—seen as arrogant
• Has a dictatorial style
• Is abrasive

It’s fairly obvious, after the fact, that Coach Jones has some serious flaws related to interpersonal interactions (he is comfortable with a transactional style of conversation) and relationship building. Nowhere in his flaws will you find a glitch in his knowledge of the sport. He has a great command of the X’s and O’s. But he has some serious team building flaws.

The two primary blind spots that emerged are: 1) his need to be right in all situations, and 2) avoiding accountability to his players and staff. Coach Jones’ “I know” attitude produced such flaws as taking credit for success and his unwillingness to listen. The desire to avoid accountability (to the stakeholders) produced his blaming of others and his dictatorial leadership style and abrasive attitude toward relationship building created cool relationships between him and his staff and players.

The prognosis for Coach Jones is not good. If he fails to discover his fatal flaws his coaching career will never recover. As a prominent coach told me, “We’re pretty good at directing our players to change, but not so great at changing ourselves.”

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New to the Second Edition of Coaching for Leadership!

We are pleased to announce a new chapter to the second edition of the best-selling Coaching for Leadership. The chapter, The Big Shift: Unlock Your Team’s Potential by Creating Player-Led Teambuilding, connects the previous edition of this book to its origin, as well as to the future of team sports.

The new chapter sets forth a practical and applicable agenda for change and improvement. The reader is introduced to seven vital elements of change; seven shifts of traditional mental models that lead to the new core principles necessary for creating a player-led team culture. Click here for more information about Coaching for Leadership

About Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

Cory Dobbs is the founder of The Academy for Sport Leadership and a nationally recognized thought leader in the areas of leadership and team building.  Cory is an accomplished researcher of human experience. Cory engages in naturalistic inquiry seeking in-depth understanding of social phenomena within their natural setting.

A college basketball coach, Cory’s coaching background includes experience at the NCAA DII, NJCAA, and high school levels of competition.  After a decade of research and development Cory unleashed the groundbreaking Teamwork Intelligence program for student-athletics. Teamwork Intelligence illuminates the process of designing an elite team by using the 20 principles and concepts along with the 8 roles of a team player he’s uncovered while performing research.

Cory has worked with professional athletes, collegiate athletic programs, and high schools teaching leadership and team building as a part of the sports experience and education process.  As a consultant and trainer Dr. Dobbs has worked with Fortune 500 organizations such as American Express, Honeywell, and Avnet, as well as medium and small businesses. Dr. Dobbs taught leadership and organizational change at Northern Arizona University, Ohio University, and Grand Canyon University.