When I started my year with the baseball team I wanted to identify what their core problems were. To accomplish this I met with players and coaches to get multiple perspectives. Coaches and players identify different issues that they want to work on. Getting these different perspectives becomes important to provide mental performance work with a team. This helps support the overall goals of the coach and helps the players buy into the focus by helping to create it. With my baseball team the players took an active role in developing the topics that we worked on throughout the year.
The coaches identified skills training as important to provide the players with tools on handling stressful situations. The players identified group cohesion and communication as topics they wanted to focus on. I developed a plan to combine these two aspects. Workshops focused on providing the team tangible tools that the players could use, while also creating an emphasis on group dynamics and interaction. These workshops helped support the gameplan that coaches developed while providing the players an opportunity to engage with each other and develop healthier team dynamics.
By the end of the season the team had improved on their record from the previous year. The players built a team culture around cohesion and support. They told me this was a huge improvement over last year where they felt the culture was unhealthy and unhelpful by the end. Working with this team I found the value of understanding the perspectives of all members on the team, coaching staff and players. Understanding the goals of the different stakeholders on a team helps the team build towards goals as a group.