Why Saying There Is No “I” in Team is Stupid: The real power of “team sports”
As I was working in the garage trying to fix a broken pool pump, I was listening to some sports radio commentary. I have been listening to The Blaze Radio continuously of late, but decided to turn on the old AM radio to see what was going on in the world of local sports when I heard the commentator state about a former star player’s fall from grace that, “he thought he was bigger than the team.” Upon hearing this I tossed my wrench aside and turned up the radio and the commentator said it again, “the player fell from grace because he thought he was bigger than ‘the team.’” I turned off the radio and turned The Blaze back on as I heard the words of Buck Sexton come over the airwaves talking about things that actually matter.
One of the largest misunderstandings that modern society has is this ridiculous notion that a “team” is greater than any individual, and that individuals should “sacrifice” themselves for the good of it. This is the menace that is being taught by high school sports all across the county, and the belief is re-enforced by idiots, beer drinkers, and drunk scallywags everywhere who contemplate why some sports teams are better than others between belches and greasy chicken wings. Knowing a thing or two about the management of people, I can report that the best way to get a team to do what a couch or manager wishes to accomplish is to get a group of individuals to aim their focus in the direction the leader establishes. But to do this, a leader must not crush the individuality of the “team members.” The leader must know that the individual attributes are much more important to the “team” than the collective sacrifice of a player to a cause “bigger than themselves.” Such an idea of sacrifice is hogwash.
In sports, all individuals are bigger than the team concept, for if any individual fails, the team will be weaker. All individuals must do their jobs to their highest ability, and as independently from one another as possible. For a team to be good, it needs a group of strong individuals who all do their jobs uniquely well to succeed, and the self-assurance to understand that they are the best at what they do, and not worried about being replaced by another because they are so good at their job.
In the case of the radio commentator, the star player in question had become a show-boater and was eventually ejected out of professional sports. But he was not ejected for being a show-boater, but because it was realized too late, that he was playing above his actual skill level. The player used his show-boating ability to cover his incompetence, which was eventually exposed. The way this lack of skill went undetected is that the management of the “team” this player played for was unable to evaluate individual attributes as their focus was on “the team.” This show-boating player uplifted the entire team with his antics, which made the coaching staff believe falsely that their team was better than it really was, because they assimilated the value of the show-boating in the same way that the player used to hide his incompetency. This failure was the fault of the “team concept.”
When some idiot says that there is no “I” in team, they are speaking of their vast ignorance on the matter. When a radio commentator says foolishly that “no player is bigger than the team,” they are speaking with a mind that is greatly deficient. All players are more important than a “team.” A team is only great if the individuals on it are superior to other individual players. A team is just a collection of individual wills and nothing more. A leader’s job is to direct those wills toward a tactical goal they set without crushing the individualism of the participants.
The lazy leader attempts to crush the individual will of each player to consider the self-sacrifice of the collective unit. The fool will allow the personal identities of individuals to be destroyed through hazing rituals, and other group assimilation hoping that by putting the “team concept” above individual ego, that success will follow…………….but it never does. Many sports players when they give interviews repeat blindly the whole team first concept, but if they are great players, they have never accepted it. They have learned to simply utter the lie to the press so to create good public relations for their teams, but they know that it is the extra hours they practice beyond the “team practice,” the extra work they do as individuals to become better than their competition that makes the difference between success and failure.
Team sports are never about the “team” but the individuals who make up the team. The leader’s job on teams is to align individual behavior with the team needs, but never to crush individual contribution as a kind of sacrifice for the collective whole. Such an idea is completely foolish which is why it shocked me to hear a sports commentator speak such an idea so openly. A lot of people say such things mindlessly because they have been taught incorrectly to think in such ways, but they are wrong. And for a sports commentator who spends their entire life thinking about sports, it would be assumed that they’d understand such an elementary concept. But this particular commentator was quite serious when he stated the error of a star player believing that they were “greater than the team.” Individuals are ALWAYS greater than a team. ALWAYS!
As I heard the statement I thought of all the dads all across the country who were also in their garages working on something similar who heard the same thing I did and thought……….yeah………he’s right. They tell their kids who play for some high school sports team the same thing, and the coaches of those teams also utter the same nonsense—then they are all confused why their teams are always mediocre. It is because their philosophy on the matter is wrong. Their understanding of the values needed to be a winner is incorrect, and they are teaching the young student athlete to grow up not to be successful contributors to all the future teams they will play on from sports to business, but only mediocre sacrificial lambs ready to throw themselves upon whatever alter the foolish coach tells them to. That same student athlete will then grow up to be mediocre, to raise mediocre children, live a mediocre life with vacations that are mediocre at best. They’ll cheat on their spouses with mediocre replacements and have mediocre friendships that are as deep as a dry river bed in a scorching desert and they’ll wonder why they are failures at life. It will be because they allowed in their mind the ridiculous, preposterous, nonsensical notion that no individual is greater than the “team” when the truth of the matter is the exact opposite.
Rich Hoffman
“If they attack first………..blast em’!”
