PEACELOVEBASKETBALL: How To Motivate Your Team
Motivating your team starts before the season even begins. It starts by figuring out how you can create a team-focused, positive environment where the players will thrive. Setting expectations and goals for practice and games is part of that process, but remember just that, it is a process. Though I will touch on some game-day ideas to help motivate your team, truly motivating your team happens throughout the year.
Create A Positive Environment
Creating a positive environment starts with the way that you talk to your players. Be positive and encourage players while you coach them. When a player makes a mistake remind yourself that they are trying to do it right. Don’t get angry, figure out how you can do your job better and keep teaching them until they improve. Another good reminder to help you be positive and patient is, that even the best players make mistakes.
Spread positive energy wherever you can. Clean up the locker room if you have one and post inspirational quotes. Give your players journals and have them right down personal and team goals. Share inspiring stories or quotes before or after practice. Bring in motivational speakers. Use your imagination and find ways to encourage your team and create a positive environment.
Encourage Team Mentality
Teach your team the importance of treating one another with respect. Help the players understand what it means to be a team player. When a team cares about one another, they will work to motivate one another. By teaching the importance of teamwork you are helping to motivate your team.
Set Goals
Having something to strive for helps give a team motivation. And getting the players involved in the goal setting is even better. You can have a big reach goal; something grand, larger than life. But also have smaller more reachable goals that help […]
Yes, You Can Play: The Evolution of Women’s Basketball
“Mom, I want to play basketball,” I said as I watched the boys move up and down the court, dribbling around each other in an effort to get to the hoop. It was 1973 and I was seven.
My mom peered at me through the bottom of her glasses and explained, “They don’t have basketball for girls your age, Sonya.” I narrowed my eyes and huffed. She gave me an exaggerated wink and said, “That doesn’t mean you can’t play.”
Not long after, my dad installed a basketball hoop in our driveway so that my brother and I could toss a basketball around with the kids in the neighborhood, and that was the beginning of my love affair with the game.
Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972
Little did I know that just one year earlier, in 1972, Congress had enacted Title IX and gave me, and young women before me, more opportunities to play. Since Title IX, which bans sex discrimination and sexual harassment in federally subsidized educational programs, including athletics, opportunities in sports for girls have skyrocketed. In fact in 1972, when I was six, just one in twenty-seven girls participated in high school sports; today, about two in five participate and the number of women playing in college continues to increase.
1976 Ann Meyer Received The First Woman’s College Basketball Scholarship
Though women had been playing basketball for eight-four years, it wasn’t until 1976 that Ann Meyer received the first woman’s college basketball scholarship, leading the way for many other women like me. And because of Title IX there are now more athletic scholarships and opportunities for women to participate in sports and to learn from the game than ever before.
LIFE: Perspectives from Mt. Whitney
Life is all about perspective, isn’t it? And the experiences we share can be similar or different, depending on our perspective of life, and on what is happening within us. This summer I climbed Mt. Whitney with my daughter, her fiance’ and their friends. I wrote about the climb in, One Step at a Time, and Charli’s wrote about it at Charli’s Chronicles. Both stories are, all at once alike, and wildly different. Enjoy!
One Step at a Time
I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, but I didn’t care. I had felt numb inside since my dad’s death, and I figured a good hike might clear my mind. I had been given the opportunity to summit Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states. A grand mountain. One built of formidable white granite spires that lift skyward to a place where headaches reign and each breath is slow and heavy. A mountain that has no glaciers or crevasses, but does have jagged peaks, and trails with dazzling carved out cliffs where a single misstep could be fatal. More than a hike, really, an experience of a lifetime.
The Whitney Portal trailhead is at 8,000 feet, the height when elevation sickness typically occurs. I would be hiking with my 28-year-old daughter and her friends. I was worried about slowing them down. The months before Mt. Whitney, I had increased my walking, and tried to sneak in a quick hike at Rattlesnake Ledge or Tiger Mountain here and there. But life had been busy, nine months early I had watched my dad die, and I was in the process of helping my mom get my childhood house ready to sell. I was now in what many call the Sandwich Years, the transition time of […]
PeaceLoveBasketball: Carmen Cruz on Connection, Team Culture and Finding Her People
I was eager to talk to Carmen Cruz, an athlete at the University of Puget Sound, thinking that an interview with an incoming freshman would give a good perspective for young readers. A peek into the first few months of college when things can be new and exciting, and also overwhelming. Especially as an athlete. And what I found in Carmen, was a young woman who was prepared for the change. Maybe not knowingly, but I sensed a strength in her to find the positive, in any situation. When we spoke, she was hoping to finally be cleared to practice again after having sustained a concussion earlier in the season. But, when I asked her about the time she’d spent off the court, and the scrimmage that she’d missed, she wasn’t too concerned, her focus was on her new team, how well they had played, and the future they all had together.
In high school Carmen was one of the top 3-point shooters in Washington State, making fifty 3-point baskets in her final season at West Seattle High School. She averaged 13.4 points per game, 4.5 rebounds per game, 2.3 assists per game and 2.5 steals per game her senior year and played AAU with Friends of Hoops.
UPDATE: Since our interview UPS has had two games, and Carmen got to play. The team didn’t come away with wins, but they are a young team, and this is preseason, so I’m looking forward to watching them grow. In the first contest, Carmen scored 16 points, and had 1 block, 1 steal, and 1 assist in 18 minutes against Ripon College. Then two days later she went 4 of 5 from the field, 2 of 2 from the free-throw line, and finished with 13 points versus Christopher Newport University, the 9th ranked NCAA […]
Meet Sonya
Meet Sonya
Sonya Elliott’s memoir, Back on the Court: A Young Woman’s Triumphant Return to Life, Love & Basketball, is her story of finding hope in the wake of tragedy after she and her fiancé were hit by a train. She blogs about writing, basketball, and life and is currently working on a Young Adult Novel and a Non-Fiction Coaching book. Stories of her career as a fashion model are woven through her memoir, as both the Soloflex and Easy Spirit Shoes commercials were filmed during that time period, and this unique and intriguing business continues to be a part of her life.
Sonya played basketball at Eastern Washington University and was a starter for the Big Sky Champion team that went to the 1987 NCAA tournament. She coached for almost 25 years and was voted Seattle Times Coach of the Year, Seattle Officials Women’s Basketball Association Coach of the Year, and twice voted Metro League Coach of the Year. She loves the game of basketball and is thankful, not only for her husband and kids but for her ability to continue to get back on the court.
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PEACELOVEBASKETBALL: How To Motivate Your Team
Motivating your team starts before the season even begins. It starts by figuring out how you can create a team-focused, positive environment where the players will thrive. Setting expectations and goals for practice and games is part of that process, but remember just that, it is a process. Though I will touch on some game-day ideas to help motivate your team, truly motivating your team happens throughout the year.
Create A Positive Environment
Creating a positive environment starts with the way that you talk to your players. Be positive and encourage players while you coach them. When a player makes a mistake remind yourself that they are trying to do it right. Don’t get angry, figure out how you can do your job better and keep teaching them until they improve. Another good reminder to help you be positive and patient is, that even the best players make mistakes.
Spread positive energy wherever […]
Yes, You Can Play: The Evolution of Women’s Basketball
“Mom, I want to play basketball,” I said as I watched the boys move up and down the court, dribbling around each other in an effort to get to the hoop. It was 1973 and I was seven.
My mom peered at me through the bottom of her glasses and explained, “They don’t have basketball for girls your age, Sonya.” I narrowed my eyes and huffed. She gave me an exaggerated wink and said, “That doesn’t mean you can’t play.”
Not long after, my dad installed a basketball hoop in our driveway so that my brother and I could toss a basketball around with the kids in the neighborhood, and that was the beginning of my love affair with the game.
Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972
Little did I know that just one year earlier, in 1972, Congress had enacted Title […]
LIFE: Perspectives from Mt. Whitney
Life is all about perspective, isn’t it? And the experiences we share can be similar or different, depending on our perspective of life, and on what is happening within us. This summer I climbed Mt. Whitney with my daughter, her fiance’ and their friends. I wrote about the climb in, One Step at a Time, and Charli’s wrote about it at Charli’s Chronicles. Both stories are, all at once alike, and wildly different. Enjoy!
One Step at a Time
I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, but I didn’t care. I had felt numb inside since my dad’s death, and I figured a good hike might clear my mind. I had been given the opportunity to summit Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states. A grand mountain. One built of formidable white granite spires that lift skyward to a place where […]
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