Routine Need Not Mean Redundant

Matt Mackey

You show up early.

Your team has a routine: a slow jog to get the blood flowing, the usual dynamic warm-up routine. From there, you move into the handful of drills you always do, working out the kinks, getting ready for prime time. Sound like the warm-up you know and love?

While this is the current paradigm, I believe there’s a lot of room for continued innovation. Dynamic (active) warm-ups have become the norm over the past decade, but the next step is to make your dynamic warm-up more…dynamic.

Progression is a fundamental component of any training program – add weight. Do more reps. Work on less rest. Why, then, do we keep the same old tired warm-up routine? Eric Cressey, a forward thinker in athletic development, changes up the mobility drills his athletes do to warm- up on a weekly basis.

I’m not suggesting that you go quite that far. However, given that most teams have at least one player who’s really into fitness, you can task this person with leading your warm-up and mixing it up every so often (or if you have a couple, let them each audition their ideas in turn on the team). Okay, you still want stability and familiarity for your pre-game warm-up; make things more routine over a couple weeks’ practices before the tournament.

Routine is great in that it lightens the cognitive load of what you’re doing, allowing you to focus on your mental game, execution, and the big picture, rather than losing the forest of a tournament for the trees of how to place your feet. However, when it comes to your body, routine breeds stagnancy. Yes, dynamic warm-ups are better than static stretches after the long jog. However, by doing the exact same knee pick-ups and butt-kick runs over and over again, your body will fall into a rut, forgetting the whole wide range of motion it hasn’t been exploring otherwise, and you’ll be leaving some of your still- dormant athleticism on the table when you step onto the field.

Some examples and ideas for you:

  • Stretching the hips: One of the few areas that needs actual stretching in most. You can do this with a Warrior Stretch if you like; more dynamic forms include the rocking rectus femoris stretch, or even a walking lunge with overhead reach.

  • Gluteal activation: This is something I don’t see teams doing much of at all, much less progressing in. Start with the cook hip lift or bilateral glute bridgesomewhere between loosening up the hips but before extended lunging or build-up runs. Progress to a one-foot-elevated glute bridge to really get your butt working for you.

  • Other hip mobility drills allow you to really work a lot of variety in; pick a couple and rotate which you do as you go.

  • Hamstring work

  • Ankle mobility

  • Upper body and core warm-up: There are options here too. You can work it in to the lower body work (think about adding a T push-up or arm- or foot-elevated planks to add complexity at the bottom of lunges or inchworms; consider adding overhead reaches from the bottom position of any of the lunge variations).

  • This list is by no means exhaustive. think about the many different body-weight exercises you can do for training, cut back from the normal workout volume, try new combinations, and turn them into a warm-up that limbers you up and continues to challenge your body on a daily basis. Like many changes, the prospect can seem more daunting than the reality. Start with what you can manage - mixing up the various lunges, trying a new exercise each week and rotating out one you’ve become too accustomed too.

There’s an ever-growing world of possibility that exists out there when it comes to fitness. A “warm-up” can be so much more than just getting the blood flowing!

What’s more, the bodily work is perhaps the easier component of your team’s preparation to work on. Here’s a thought exercise for you: while there’s plenty of room to add a degree of planning and progression to the physical warm-up, there’s even MORE potential for you to continually challenge your team with a progression of the drills and skills you do. As your team continues to gel and hone skills over the season, is it enough simply to run your warm-ups and drills the same way as always, or can you nudge yourself to greater heights with more modifications?

Self-Sustaining Team Culture

Matt Mackey

A former captain and then-coach of mine offered only this advice when I described to him the multitude of ideas and plans we rising seniors at Dartmouth had for team leadership and culture in the coming season: It’s always harder than you think.

This message is worth keeping in mind for anyone seeking to engineer or change something as amorphous yet integral as one’s team culture - it’s all too easy to get caught up in the energy and excitement of the season and neglect the grand ideas and notions you have for making this season the season for you and your teammates, to say nothing of the difficulty of managing people in general.

Of course, being difficult makes it all the more worth doing.

Managing Personalities - Appear (and be) Open to Suggestions:
I like to think of team culture as the sum of (at least) two potentially competing energies: that of the team leaders (they may be captains, they may be team veterans - they are the ones you traditionally look to to set the tone), and that of the vocal minority. I’ve found that these energies are typically generated by only about 20% of a roster; the other 80% are willing to go along with the pervading culture. Don’t underestimate the potency of this minority to subvert team culture, and don’t assume that they don’t exist

  • oftentimes they are most vocal when you aren’t listening.

Team leaders would be well advised to actively work to cultivate the appearance (and reality) of being open to outside ideas and input from all members of the team - an insular leadership commands less respect, and therefore less influence, on team culture than an integrated one.

Cultural Considerations:
That said, the big questions you have to address when seeking to identify, establish, and nurture one’s team culture are:

  • What’s feasible? Is it realistic to expect a college team to have perfect attendance at practices? To work out thrice a week? To stay on-point and undistracted at practices and in tournaments? No doubt some goals for the way you want team culture to develop fall into this challenging category. Honestly assess your motivation and what you’re willing to do to reach these goals - it may be that you can only devote energy to one goal at a time, but once one aspect is established, this then builds momentum toward further progress.

  • Where do you compromise? If you cannot realistically expect perfect attendance, where’s the point you’re willing to be OK with? If you’re going to insist on a rigorous workout schedule, are you willing to permit a lower effort level at practice itself as the team adapts to a higher workload? Know where you stand on the trade-offs between reaching your goals perfectly and reaching the point of “good enough.” You will find this threshold tested at times and you may need to take the process one step at a time if your changes are especially transformative.

  • How do you continually reinforce this culture? Once you’ve achieved your goal - say, gotten team buy-in on regular workouts - how do you ensure that this is sustained over time? This is where the real challenge and art of managing people and team comes into play. Reminding your teammates of the team goals (hopefully your team as a whole has met and established some) that inspire the culture - in this case, a reminder of team on-field aspirations to inspire hard work - is often effective, as it appeals to both individual desires and to obligation to the team; social pressures are a strong force for reinforcing change.

A Note on “Intensity”:
Perhaps the most difficult and contentious component of team culture to establish and sustain is the team’s “persona” - what kind of energy do you bring to the field? Are you more likely to be seen with a smile, a scowl, a no-nonsense look? Unlike some qualities that make a team, there’s a wide range of individual preference here, and while some teams have the luxury of selecting for a certain personality, most teams are a mosaic of individual approaches and feels for how a given game and tournament should play out.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to change personalities. It is quite possible, if still difficult, to establish some baseline expectations for team conduct, whether they be implicit or explicit. Oregon Fugue’s remarkable experiment in team spirit - contesting no calls - is an exemplary example of this. I don’t doubt that some members of the team were more given to argue than others, but as the thing built and took on its own life, the personality of the Individual is subjugated by the will of the Team.

Seek out and nurture those Team impulses, and you’ll create a team culture that self-sustains and refuses to crumble.