AAGS 2021

41 Our equation for success, it starts with this idea that our best shot at doing historic things. Winning gold medals winning world championships is to be the best team we possibly can be, to basically out-team opponents across the net. Anybody who’s played in a team sport for a while has been on such teams. They’re the best experiences that you can recall, or you’ve played against such teams. They’re pesty, they’re feisty. If it’s football, somebody on your team has the ball and all of a sudden there’s seven people around and you can’t figure out how that happened. They’re playing as hard as they can and they’re celebrating each other’s successes, it starts with this idea of being the best team possible. We also focus greatly on just good people, people of high character and integrity. I guess the New Zealand All Blacks would call it the no Dickhead rule, the no knucklehead rule. We love the group, we have lots of really high character people, and then finally we want to be a place of learning. We don’t want to be a place of being where we are now, but of becoming something better. We put that all together and that got us far, but it wasn’t enough. In the last couple of years, it was certainly a really important and great collaboration between our coaching staff and all of the members, especially the core 23 members of our team, only 12 of which could travel to Tokyo. We had some things happen and take place, some planned, some not that encouraged ownership, accountability, democracy, trust, things like that amongst the team so that we could be that kind of team that everybody has this great memory of. I remember that team that I was on, where everybody just seemed to care more about the team than themselves. More about others’ successes when nobody cares who gets the credit. There’s incredible power in that. You won a bronze medal, which is an achievement in itself, in the Rio Olympics. Did the strategy change from there or was it more of the same, just harder, more focused? Does the strategy change depending on what you’re going for? First of all, we thought we were capable of winning. We weren’t the only team, there were several teams capable of winning in Rio. We ended up losing only one match, a very close match to Serbia. After we had beaten them in the preliminary rounds, we lost to Serbia in the semi-finals. It was a soul crushing defeat, one of the toughest defeats that any of us has had. Then we went on two years later in 2018 and finished fifth in the World Championships and grossly underperformed. That’s really what drove the point home, that how this idea of pursuing team having great people and being a place of learning was not enough. And so that’s where we all, as a group decided we need to up the level of ownership, accountability, democracy, trust and things like that. That’s where it really stepped up. And it started early in 2020 as everybody around the world was experiencing lockdowns. We thought, how do we put that extra 12 months to best use? How do we sharpen our swords better and how do we develop this sense of team amongst our 23 players? We had a number of zoom meetings, a critical element in that is we added a member to our staff. It’s very common these days for teams to have a mental skills coach, otherwise known as a mental performance coach or a sports psychologist. We decided, and this was actually our players driving this decision, but we decided to go a little bit of an unorthodox route and added basically a culture coach to our staff. Her name’s Sue Enquist, she had great success as a softball player and softball coach herself. One of the advantages for her to join our staff was that most sports psychologists, most mental performance coaches don’t have the experience of what it’s like to be a head coach. I know I did plenty of it when I was a player, it’s really easy to complain about the coach’s decision on this, the coach’s decision on that and fall into that trap. Some of those are legitimate complaints, some aren’t. When you have someone working with a team, often without the rest of our staff, it was hugely helpful for both our team and for our staff to have somebody who had had the experience as a coach to say, think of it from their perspective. For example, our team believed it and we believed that a little too, that some people, maybe many people, were focused on a certain role being a starter, being on the court as the game began rather than being waiting for their turn, as we might call it a game changer or a ‘firewoman’. Everybody in our program agreed there was a little too much focus on that so Sue drove the point home with them. She said, you all need to be chess pieces. You need to be ready for your coaches to plug you in wherever you’re needed. And if they decide that in the up to eight matches you play in the Olympics, that they’re going to plug you in differently, every single match, because that’s what’s called for, from the opponent across the net, you need to be prepared to do that. I think she could speak from that with much greater authority, and they had much greater trust in her because of her experience. That would be an example of the huge advantage that we had in adding to what we thought was a really good culture, but something that put us over the hump and allowed us to play and to really accomplish what we wanted to, to out-team our opponents, as we face them across the net at the Olympics. As far as your team makeup was concerned, no team, however successful is, is happy all the time, what are your secrets in team management and dealing with the superstars What are your secrets to keeping that harmony? I don’t know if there are any great secrets, but what works for us and what has worked for us, especially in this year of 2021, our most successful year was this