The Holy Grail in Sport – How to Select the Best Team?
Ask any successful business person or entrepreneur what makes their business so powerful and most respond with some variation of the theme, ‘selection of their people’. Even ask couples with enduring and loving relationships, what makes them so happy together and they often say ‘tremendous selection’! Sport is no different. Ask any of the coaching greats what makes the most successful team and almost without exception their immediate response is ‘selection’. Selection is the fabric or building block to exceptional results on and off the field.
So is achieving ‘perfect’ selection, the Holy Grail of sport? That is likely debatable, in the end, getting it right (or as close to ‘right’ as possible), makes a significant impact on your results. It also creates a more rewarding and enjoyable experience for your athletes and you as a coach!
(Please note that when we talk about team selection, do not exclude yourself entirely from this conversation if you are an individual athlete coach. Team selection boundaries cross into squad dynamics too. Also, before we start, there is no way we can do this topic justice in a few pages, however we have done our best to cover what we believe are the key elements and often the critical areas that can be overlooked or rushed over.)
Whilst canvassing the various points of view on team selection, one point of commonality was the degree to which all agreed, team selection can make or break your season. Starting with the “right” athletes is a fundamental component of eventual success. When I ask coaches and selection committees how they select their teams, they usually launch into a detailed description of an analysis of the physical and technical aspects of the perfect team for their sport and then how to identify that in potential athletes to take those spots. A vast majority of their time and effort is focused on the physical aspects of the athletes and what is needed from a technical skill or physical capability for each position in the team. This is across sports from rowing to track & field to the various codes of football, it is a constant and recurring approach.
In this article we propose a methodology for best practice team selection which you can apply to your sport. It incorporates both the physical and technical aspects of your sport as well as the ‘other’ elements that make an extraordinary team. Before we proceed on the topic of team selection, there is a critical element we must consider first and that is the ‘culture’ of your team or squad.
Bo Hanson is 4x Olympian, Coaching Consultant & Director of Athlete Assessments. To learn how to Improve Team Performance, please visit http://www.athleteassessments.com/
Processing your request, Please wait....
