Legacy: What the All Blacks can teach us about the business of life I know at least one other poster is reading it. Feel free to add if you ever pick it up or join the discussion. Great book if you are looking to build a team from a culture standpoint. The New Zealand All Blacks are considered to be one of the top teams in their domain. Bigger than UWNT dominance in theirs. As the title implies one of the core values of the ABs is the idea if leaving the uniform in a better place than when you got it. Its this idea of a higher purpose than fuels great teams. Its strange to think about playyng for a higher purpose for youth teams. But not so crazy to cinsider it for running a youth club.
I've read the book twice now and am working toward using some of the principles in establishing a culture for my 19U team which will hopefully trickle down throughout the club. I have 20 typed pages of notes that I am working to condense down into main ideas that I intend to turn into a playbook for our club. I think you're right that it would be a stretch to build some of these concepts into a younger team, but building them into the program as a whole is definitely doable. I like the ideas of "this is how we do things here" and establishing a "higher purpose" for your program. Then marrying the higher purpose and way you do things with the individuals' personal goals and meanings. Obviously, to really build something like this you have to have buy in from your leadership and the families. A starting point could be the idea of rituals. I think that could be a good way to introduce young players and new families into your program. I thought it would be cool to have the older players meet the new players and welcome them to the club and distribute uniforms. "Welcome to our club. We're glad you chose to be one of us. Here's your uniform. Wear it with pride, and try to be the best #38 to ever play here."
I didn't think of it as "culture"; I thought of it as mentality. I see mentality as something you can teach in 100% of your contact time. There is no need to periodize it.
I think @rca2 is right. It's not something you teach. It's who you are. It's the values you hold and how you do things and the standards you set. You're building your team's culture when you select your players and then every contact you have with them on and off the field. Everything contributes one way or another toward building "the way we do things here". Right now I'm not training or even seeing my 19Us in person, but we did goal setting activities earlier this month. Now I'm following up with the players individually to refine their goals. With respect to culture, there are three main reasons I'm doing this: 1. Obviously, knowing what you want to improve as a player is important. Failure to plan is planning to fail. 2. A lot of these players haven't ever put pen to paper and set goals for themselves or thought about how to set effective goals. My hope is that they take this skill in use it outside soccer too. 3. It's building the values I want to see, specifically commitment both from me to them and from them to themselves and the team.
So I just finished turning my 20+ pages of notes into a 6 page "distilled" outline of the book and topics covered. I think the next step would be turning that into a workbook of sorts with ideas for creating a culture within a team. At this point though, I'm not convinced that's going to be worth the effort for my club so I'll probably leave it sitting for a while until I get the itch to work on this more. With my 19Us this season, I've tried to be thoughtful about creating our language like they discussed in chapter 12. I stole a definition of sportsmanship from a Dan Blank book, and I try to start every training session by reminding the boys about that and pushing each other to be their best. During our warmup we talk about putting our "game faces" on and "practicing how we want to play". Throughout training we talk about "champions doing extra". I've had my own principles of "Play hard. Play smart. Have fun." for the last few years that we've continued with as well. Over the winter I heard about the core principles that Juwan Howard adopted when he took over at Michigan: family, trust, accountability, and sacrifice. I talked about those with my team and how they would work for us so we've kind of adopted those as well. When we have something I can tie back to those core principles, I try to do that. I anticipated needing to use these to enforce discipline, but thankfully that hasn't been as big of an issue as I thought it would be. The idea with all these and the intentional language is that if we repeat the words, or sayings or mantras enough and if they're really relevant, the guys will internalize them and own them individually, even if they do it subconsciously. I will have "sung my world into existence" as the book says.