|
 Coming off a high from PCA's second Annual Student-Athlete Leadership Conference at Stanford last weekend, I was struck by the dustup between Landon Donovan and David Beckham around Grant Wahl's new book The Beckham Experiment.
The conference is one of my favorite times each year. Attendees are some of the most amazing high school student-athletes you could imagine -- those on our National Student-Athlete Advisory Board and others who won PCA Triple-Impact Competitor Scholarships last year.
At our conference, we often focused on what it means to be a good teammate. Helping teammates improve is one of three components of PCA's Triple-Impact Competitor model. (The other components are improving oneself and improving the sport as a whole.)
Being a good teammate is often difficult. It is an intricate dance of cooperation and competition. For example, you may compete with teammates for playing time even while you (ideally) cooperate with them to defeat the opponent. Lots of room for disagreements, misunderstandings, hurt feelings and competing agendas.
Donovan and Beckham are high-profile teammates for Major League Soccer's Los Angeles Galaxy, whose deteriorating relationship is detailed in Wahl's book. For example, Donovan, team captain before Beckham arrived, gave up the captain's armband in deference to Beckham's long tenure as one of the top players in the world, but things did not go well and Donovan told Wahl of his dissatisfaction with Beckham.
There are intriguing details about how this relationship went sour, such as Beckham's failure to pick up a dinner tab, but I want to use the Donovan-Beckham relationship as a teachable moment. What can youth athletes learn from it about being the best teammate they can be?
- What do you do when you have a talented teammate who isn't as committed as you to the success of the team?
- Is it ever okay to deal with your frustration by complaining to an outside source about a teammate?
- What should a talented newcomer do to integrate into the team?
- Can you fill teammates' Emotional Tanks (to help them play better) even if you don't like them?
- How can you keep yourself motivated to give your best when a teammate is unfairly getting more credit than you?
Visit our Youth Sports Spotlight blog to write your reactions to these questions and share your personal experience of being a teammate, your memories of great (or not so great) teammates, what makes someone a great teammate, and what youth athletes can do to make themselves great teammates.
Finally, if you appreciate what PCA is doing to help youth athletes become Triple-Impact Competitors who make their teammates better, we'd love you to consider joining or renewing as a PCA Member. With your support we can do more!
-- Jim Thompson, PCA Founder |
