Team organization

The most successful organization I have ever been a part of was my crew team in high school. Growing up I had been on countless on sports teams, but rowing definitely proved to be a culture of its own. As a freshman you start out on the novice team, and focus on conditioning and form on the water. At the rowing club there would be tanks which consisted of two bodies of water on the sides and a stationary mock boat that allowed our coach to walk up and down and fix what we may be doing wrong. The importance of rowing is to have every oar in the boat go into the water at the same time, equal pressure pulling through the water, and come out of the water at the same time. Furthermore, every boat or “shell” contains stationary foot rest in which a rower would strap his feet into and a moving seat. A stroke consists of sliding up the seat in order to shift an oar back, after a rower slides up the stroke he pushes through the water using the strength in one’s thighs and the steady guide of one’s arms to repeat the motions of moving the oar in and out of the water.

            After spending less than a semester on the novice team, my coach moved me and three other girls up to varsity in order to compete in the Head of the Charles in Boston. This is the largest rowing competition (or regatta) in the country, and people come from all over the world to compete. This is probably the most frustrating part of the sport for rowers, the politics behind the game. Coaches will single out members of the team, and spend all of their time focusing on make one boat the best instead of the team better as a whole. However, being the reciprocate of such favoritism made me blind to the corruption behind our coaches. We would have separate practices before school, just the four of us and our coxswain (the person in front of the boat who steers and directs the rowers). In addition to our boat, a senior 8 man boat was also going to this competition. We would have dinners with these girls, and ended up becoming very close. After the regatta in Boston, our two boats came our extremely successful. We saw our success as our coach’s ability to pair up girls who could sync well on the water. We did not pay attention to the lack of attention our other teams members were receiving. While we did have two good boats, our coaches were not doing a great job balancing and managing the other 6 boats on the team. This was clear when at the state finals these boats finished 4 in last place 1 in 7/10 and one in second place; while our two boats came in first. The most peculiar part was the next season, instead of focusing on getting all of our boats in first our coaches took the one boat that came in second and put them in our practices. The results at the end of the season proved similar to the season before; although those five boat left out of our practices continued to place poorly.

            My team was based on dual authority, with one head coach and her assistant. The fact that there was only two people coach a team of 45 girls definitely played into their need to pick favorites. Our head coach placed us in all of our seats, and the assistant focused on videotaping and analyzing our form on the water. By the time I reached my senior year, there was a girl that transferred from another school and onto our team. She was clearly better than I was, and I understood when she took my spot on the boat. However, when I was kicked down to the boats that received significantly less attention I understood why these boats were not doing so well. For one, the girls on this boat did not take it seriously because the coaches did not take us seriously. Secondly, because we were not given as much attention and practice we were never able to fix our issues. By my second semester I ended up quitting the team, I had voiced my opinions multiple times to my coaches and nothing ever changed. I refused to be in a sport I once took so seriously, and turn it into something of a joke.


            In any type of organization, the most important part of a leader is their ability to see the strengths every member has and what they can provide to a team. Once employees feel like that are useless, they begin to become useless by default.

Comments

  1. I am acknowledging this post. However, it is late. Please get your posts done earlier in the future.

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  2. I gather you didn't do crew at all before high school. I wonder if you could speak to the appeal of doing that. As I was a students at MIT for a year and a half and the campus is right next to the Charles River, I did see a lot of crew when I a student there. That a major river would encourage the activity makes some sense to me. Was there such a river where you lived and where your high school team practiced? Or did something else draw you to this?

    It seems to me that 45 students is quite a lot for coaches to manage. What were the rules for making the team? Did anyone who wanted to try out get some position on the team? Is there any advantage to the school for having such a large team?

    Let me give a hypothetical, though one meant to be consistent with your story. Suppose the principal of the high school set the rules and said any student who wants to be on the team can be. Suppose the coaches, who view the principal as their boss, don't agree with this rule. They only want members of the team who can be competitive. In that circumstance, how would the coaches respond? Would what you reported be the obvious outcome?

    Now I want to flip this and ask, did you think through a possible scenario where what the coaches did made sense and wasn't entirely selfish? Then I want to go back to the beginning. If nobody on the team had prior experience with crew before high school, were they approximately equal as beginners? If so, it must have been that some progressed faster than others. Should those who learned slowly get a lot of the attention from the coaches?

    By the way, this is a huge question in all of teaching, not just crew.

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