Cornstone For Success- 4 C's!

I've always had a motto with my programs based around what I call the 4 C's -Confidence, Coniviction, Composure and Communication! I truly believe these four qualities are the cornerstone for any succesful team. This spring we've been focusing a great deal of our time on the fourth C, possibly the most important, communication.

I always remind our players that the more information they give, the easier they make the game for their teammates. This past fall the saying "Cheat Outloud" came out of team, which meant give your teammates as much information as you can don't just keep it to yourself. Too often players have the answers and know the solutions but keep that information to themselves. This stems from another one of my favorite quotes (can you tell this is a big emphasis with our program yet): Knowledge without action is wasted! It's always been amazing to me to watch 2 teams that dig into a knock down, full out match and are exhausted in a 0-0 tie late in the game and 99% of the time the team that communicates better wins.

Outside of the normal opportunities in training to work on communication we spend a lot of time working on the respect and trust factors that lead to communication. Even last night a large group of our team went to the TCU baseball game after training. They make a point to do things away from the field together to help spurn that respect.

We'll also do different games with the team to focus on the type of communication they give each other. Right before spring break we had a relay race with groups of 3 where 1 teammate was blindfolded. The course took the blindfolded teammate up the stairs around buildings, under fencing, down hills basically all over the place where the teammates had to give concise, direct and accurate information to direct their blindfolded teammate.

It's definetely an area where we will always continue to focus because I truly believe as a wise man once said: "The easiest way to break the human spirit is to rip us away from our conversations; we must never, never stop talking, as deep and far as we can go."