The Spirit Inside

I don’t really see the colour a team wears as having any real impact. When my daughter started playing for her junior football team, she wore a purple kit. When she moved to a new team to play senior football she started to play in red. The kit didn’t affect her determination to do her best, but she became very attached to her number, which was Number 5 in her first year. Ever since, she has chosen that number when she has been able to. It is part of her personal ‘brand’ and she is definitely more comfortable having that number on her back whether she realises it or not.

So, the first thing I would do if I set up a sports team would be to ask my players to choose and keep their number. Colour wise I might choose purple for old time’s sake, but that would be the only reason.

The most important thing for any team is spirit and togetherness. When you have the right coach setting the right direction and encouraging the right approach, the team will play their best. My daughter had really good coaches and really bad coaches as a junior. The really bad coaches had one thing in common, favourites and a focus on results over performance. I saw two or three occasions where the coach damaged the spirit of the team due to those approaches and the performance got worse and worse. When the coaches stopped doing that the performance improved. I could never understand why grown men (and it was invariably men) would come into girls’ football without trying to understand the difference between that and boys’ football. The atmosphere was key. Get that right and you get the best performance. To give the coaches their due, they were giving up their time and often getting loads of criticism from the parents, occasionally justified, much more often not. We had three really good seasons out of seven because the atmosphere was right. It’s interesting to reflect on the way that the girls reacted to their coaches, as they could do so with fear or enthusiasm. When the atmosphere was right that fear of a bad performance was taken away and the result was a much better experience for everyone involved. With one glaring exception, the coaches we came across only ever did things for the best as they saw it, but it didn’t always go as well as they wanted.

Mascots are a nonsense in my opinion. They add nothing to a club and nothing to a team within that club. I would absolutely refuse to have one. When we go to the Emirates to see Arsenal they have a mascot called Gunnersaurus and watching it lumber around the perimeter of the pitch is an unnecessary distraction.

For anyone who is involved in a team the most important things are enjoyment and improvement. If those two aspects are in place everything else is taken care of. The players will want to play and they will improve naturally as a result. That would be at the absolute centre of any club I set up.