Culture

Today, a topic I get questions about all the time.

Culture.

I’m not going to dive deep into what culture is and how your team can achieve it (in this post at least)…

But I am going to give you a great rule of thumb to see if your team already has great culture.

Look at this next game:

When one of the players on your team scores, who cheers for them?

Two things to look at:

1. The players on the bench.

If all players are clapping and cheering, great.

Usually the players who aren’t cheering for their teammate are the same players who will selfishly dribble the basketball from one end of the court to the other before taking a wild shot attempt. They only care about their own success.

The players who celebrate their teammates are team-first players. And those are the ones we want on our team!

2. The parents of the players.

Which parents cheer for the success of all players on the team?

And which parents only celebrate when their child scores?

This is one of the easiest ways to immediately find out which parents are in it for the whole team, and which parents only care about the success of their son or daughter. I’ve seen crazy celebrations from some parents when their child does anything remotely good, and not a peep out of them when one of their child’s teammates takes a charge. This is not good.

These two things will show you your team’s culture straight away…

If you have players on the bench who are cheering for their teammates when they score…

And…

If you have parents who cheer as hard for other children as they do for their own kid…