I’ve played sports my entire life, but I never truly understood or appreciated what a team really is. I took it for granted because my high school teams had amazing chemistry, and we worked together really well from the very beginning. When I first got to my college team though, nothing was the same. We simply practiced and competed together. The team was full of cliques and we weren’t the large, dysfunctional family that I’ve known my other sports teams to be. After I arrived, I was able to see my college team make a remarkable transition, and I realized that a team doesn’t just meet up for practice a few days a week and travel together on the weekends; it’s so much more than that.
I was lucky enough to be one of the first freshman to earn a position on my team’s governing committee. My coach saw my drive and work ethic and he felt that I deserved to have a voice and help make decisions. Soon after I joined the committee, we collectively decided that we didn't feel like we were on a team. We came up with ideas and discussed our thoughts with the rest of the team and from there we started to make small changes.
The first time we all noticed a difference was at a tournament in Savannah, Georgia. We were there for the weekend, and we spent our down time conversing and playing corn hole. We were admittedly pretty loud, but we were laughing and having fun. It was something I had never seen before with such a large group from my team and it was so satisfying to witness. At our team meeting the following week, nobody had any criticism as to how the weekend went; all of my teammates spoke of our apparent high comradery and how different that tournament was from all of our previous ones. People were really starting to see who I was: we lacked a certain closeness that other sports teams have.
After my teammates and I started to make the transition from being mere acquaintances to being more of a family, I began to see that being a team is represented by all the times we hang out laughing and joking around with each other. Our tournaments naturally have hours worth of down time, so we spend it together. We have so many inside jokes that would be impossible to explain to anyone because of all of the "you had to be there" moments that we have together. Had we not spent so much time together recently, we wouldn't have known that one of our teammates was accidentally registered to vote as a Democrat, and we wouldn't be able to joke about it. Jokes aside, being a team comes from spending time together outside of practice.
Being a part of a team is complaining about the trip to a tournament taking too long despite the fact that we’re all secretly having fun and loving every minute of it. That five hour trip may have taken eight because we may or may not have gotten lost, but we spent the whole trip laughing and reminiscing about past tournaments and looking forward to what was to come. We made it eventually and everything was fine, and now we have a mess of a road trip to tell stories about.
Being a team is sitting in the rocking chairs at a Cracker Barrel in Small Town, USA, and everyone stops talking (which doesn't happen often) and starts singing along to a country song. I never realized the irony of some of my team members quietly singing along to Billy Currington's words, "Thank God for good directions," until now. That was the same trip we briefly got lost on, but you could say we really didn't get lost at all. We found direction in our dysfunction and it led us to becoming closer.
Sure, we aren’t perfect and we have things to work on. There’s always going to be misunderstandings and issues; that’s part of being a family. We will argue and get annoyed with each other but we will also laugh and have fun and we will win. Our transition to becoming a family will make us unreachable. No other team will be able to shake our mental games because we have a solid support system within each other and we're working together to make it stronger. That’s what it means to be a real team.
