In a recent Leadership Roundtable Conference Call for leaders of schools and youth sports organizations partnered with Positive Coaching Alliance, we identified several best practices in:
- The criteria used to name captains
- Specific responsibilities captains are given
- How captains can help establish and maintain your program's culture.
All are important considerations that can help you succeed this season and beyond, on the field and beyond.
Criteria
Rather than simply awarding the title of captain to your best performer, look for what we call "Triple-Impact Competitors," who are committed to improving themselves, their teammates and the game as a whole. As a coach, introduce the concept of the Triple-Impact Competitor during tryouts and pre-season so that players understand the basis on which you will select captains.
In addition to helping you identify captains, this will inspire players who aspire to captaincy to suddenly pay a bit more attention to helping their teammates. Of course, this improves individual and team performance and can reinforce a strong team culture, which carries rewards far beyond the playing field.
Once you have identified your Triple-Impact Competitors, other factors that can determine whom you name captain include:
- Who works the hardest in pre-season
- Who singularly goes above and beyond your expectations in terms of improving self, teammates or game
- Who might contribute even more to your team due to the psychological boost of being named captain.
Responsibilities
Captains should complement coaches as arbiters of team culture. Sometimes they may help you focus players' attention when it wanders. Other times they may represent players' points of view on game strategy, practice plans or how to ensure that all players stay aligned toward team goals.
Coaches must find their own comfort level with the captain's level of authority among teammates and take care to understand and cultivate the appropriate level of respect teammates afford to captains. With the right balance, coaches can keep a finger on the pulse of the team through the captains, and captains can voice the players' divergent ideas to coaches without undermining the coaches' authority. Tom Coughlin achieved this with the New York Giants last season by assembling an 11-player "leadership council."
Captains also can lead in a variety of routine ways, such as:
- Leading stretching and warm-up/cool-down sessions
- Communicating with officials
- Organizing off-field activities
- Finding ways to include teammates who are less integrated into the team
- Helping settle disagreements among teammates
- Assigning other routine tasks, such as carrying equipment or preparing practice fields, making sure to take their turn in leading by example.
Establishing and Maintaining Your Program's Culture
Choosing the right captains and charging them with appropriate responsibilities sets them up not just as team leaders but as exemplars for your program. They can proudly represent your team in the broader community.
They can visit the schools or organizations that feed players into your program and encourage younger players to continue working on their games so they can play for you. And they can return after passing through your program to share inspiring stories of the past with their successors who are carrying forward your established values, traditions and culture.
This article isthe eighth in a series of articles created exclusively for USA Football as part of Responsible Sports (http://www.responsiblesports.com/). This national program brings together USA Football, Liberty Mutual and Positive Coaching Alliance (http://www.positivecoach.org/) in an effort to benefit millions of youth athletes, parents and coaches.