Thursday, October 25, 2012

TEAM BUILDING: A DAILY PROCESS

This came from University of Kentucky head women's basketball coach Matthew Mitchell at SEC Media Day in Birmingham today.  He makes an important point that creating a "team" -- working on "chemistry" is an everyday job:

We think we have a good group of players and so right now the challenge is just try to become a team and don’t take that for granted. That’s not something that we think just happens automatically. So right now we’re just in a position of trying to every day do the things necessary to come together as a team, so they’re practicing hard, and we have our sights on having a really good year this year and we think we can do that.

On what he does to foster a team:
Well, I just think it’s a daily process. I don’t think you can just do it when fall practice starts and I don’t think you can start thinking about it when the season starts or, I think it just really goes back to when you first start forming the team, and for us that starts in June when the kids arrive for summer school, and so we just do a lot of team building activities from the standpoint of just try to be together, talk about what success looks like, how we get there, and so it’s just really a daily process. It’s not any one certain thing. I think it’s something you have to be working at each and every day.