Morgan Shadwell
Montgomery
English 101

In my paper I want to go into depth about the BSU football team and give everyone on the outside an inside look on who they are. I am going to answer the question of who is the team as a whole but more importantly how they interact, communicate, and reason. Being a BSU football manager I have had the opportunity to work closely with individual groups of players and the team as a whole. I have been able to experience how the players are towards each other and the coaches on and off the field and the relationships they form with one another. I have been able to talk to coaches and even sit in on special teams meetings. While being a part of all this I realized one thing they all are family and a little communities within the team. I think they fit the Idea of a discourse community because they have their own ways of talking with one another and not just professionally and in a team matter but also in a personal way too. They have their own “language”, they have common goals, and not just anyone can belong. I was able to really connect my idea to the lessons behind the readings of Branick “Coaches Can Read Too”, Marro” The Genres of Chi Omega”, and Mirabelli “Learning to serve”. As I was reading these articles each one had a different perspective on how a team should operate. I was able to connect these articles in the sense that Branick explained coaches and coaching from a different point of view. He helped me look at the coaching staff and the characteristics that each individual one possessed to make them a good coach, a personable coach, and how their certain styles of coaching influenced different players and how they connected with each other and the players. Reading Morro I was able to not only able to relate this to the players but also myself. The players very obviously demonstrate this because we have “blue bloods” or “red shirts” which are our new guys and then our veterans who are our returning players. Last I am able to connect to the Mirabelli reading about serving because as a football team we have so many different ways of communication just like servers. All of these articles each have a different lesson behind them but they all have one thing in common which is they are all teams working together to achieve a common goal which is exactly what the football team does.
My freshman year in high school I was introduced to the football team as their team manager, I learned so much about what a family meant and what earning your title meant. I was able to then become the top manager at my school and was in charge of 4 other girls at a time. When it was my time to head to college my coaches wrote me recommendation letters so that I could continue with my passion and love for football. I was then I was accepted into the Boise State program. The Boise State Football team is one big extended family with little immediate families intertwined in it. Communication comes in many different forms in football. In order to get a better understanding I asked to sit in on a meeting that the coaches and the team captains and the coaches were having and I was able to explore how they communicate and what words they use to do so. In this meeting I learned the coaches use email, text messages, and even schedules to communicate with the team. During practice we also use things like scripts for offense and defense so show the different areas each position will be participating in. I asked one of the players on the team David Lucero what communication was like between players and if they were personal texts or “work” related. He said “Communication between players is very much via texts and that the communication is very personal unless it was to someone we aren’t close to on the team then it is more of professional setting.” I then asked the coaches if there were players they had more of a close relationship with or not and one replied “ yes there are some players we have more of personal