Leadership: Association Football and Team Essay

Submitted By Mannan2
Words: 1801
Pages: 8

Mid-Term Paper – Assessing a Team [DLA]

Mannan Kohli
Collaboration exists in the world all around us. In fact, it is so abundant in today’s modern world that we often don’t even notice when we collaborate with others. As such, we don’t realize all of the teams that we are a part of or even lead. These groups can range from Sports teams to Exec boards for Student Organizations. So, I’ve come to realize that I have been part of numerous teams from middle school to college. However, when asked to think of a team to analyze, I picked the team that I had been part of the longest and a team that is very close to my heart.

A particularly effective team that I have been a part of was my high school soccer team. It was a team consisting of 21 boys aged 14-18 with one coach. This was a tactical team with the clear goal of winning the national cup at the end of the year. The team was not “Successful” in 3 of the 4 years I was a part of it but in my last year the team was “successful”. The team had one captain and one vice-captain. I held the role of the vice-captain in the team. I am going to first analyze the team as a whole and then I’m going to take a look at my role in the team.

One of the best things about this team was that everyone on the team knew what the goal of our team was and where are priorities should lie. One of the ways that our goal was drilled into our heads was that in our home dressing room, the coach had a saying on the wall engraved, which said, “Come 15th March, we are going to have the National Cup in our hands.” At a home game, whenever we were not doing too well going into half time, all coach had to do was point at the saying. It was a simple yet effective method of reminding us that whatever else may be going on, our final objective should always be getting our hands on that cup. There was also a sense of urgency in our group that came from the fact that all of us knew that we only had a certain amount of time in this team before we graduated and we needed to make the most of it. So, you could see the seniors who knew that they were going to graduate at the end of the year, pushing the younger kids a little harder and stretching to their limits.

Another area, where I feel our team excelled was having a great results driven structure. Everybody on our team knew what their roles were, they knew what other peoples roles were and they knew who to hold accountable in what situation. This resulted in open communication whenever any of us committed a mistake in a game and so the other team members immediately let that person he needed to step it up himself or ask for help from us. At the end of every game, we were required to rate how we felt each player had done in the game and this was made public the next day. This resulted in a great 360-review system by our peers and all of us were very comfortable with this type of strategy.

One of the areas where we lacked was technical ability in Soccer. We did not possess any star players except for our captain and the rest of us were average soccer players with the exception of our goalkeeper who was downright incompetent. We all possessed one or two areas where we excelled but on an overall level, we were for the most part very mediocre soccer players. This was easily evidenced by the fact that only one of us went on to play college soccer and not surprising it was our captain.

The team made up for this shortcoming by having great relationships with each other and the coach. All of us were very competent personally and we were very open with each other about any aspect of life. I feel that this helped us a lot on game days because when we knew that the other team was better than us, we always seemed to step our game to another level we didn’t even know we had and I always felt that this was due to us actually caring about what happened to each outside of soccer too. For ex: many of us actually took similar classes and so often bonded outside of