The Next Week...

The team that I observe started this week off by practicing on Monday morning. There was no school for them today, so the coach decided that practicing early would be beneficial for the team. The weather is starting to get cold this particular week. Many of the players were wearing long sleeves. Some of the players had the hand warmers you wrap around yourself like a belt. I could over hear some of the players discussing they didn’t want to be at practice so early in the morning, and also didn’t want to be out in the cold. The morale of the team showed that they didn’t want to be there this morning. The team really looked sluggish today. The head coach noticed the lack of motivation. He brought the team together to try to fix some things during this particular practice. Normally the coach would have probably just made the team run because of the lethargic effort. This was a new thing he was doing by gathering the guys up and talking to them. He said things such as, ‘you don’t get to play this game forever, so enjoy every second that you are out here. You don’t want to look back at your football career and have regrets.’ The team responded pretty well. I think they used that first part of practice to use as motivation and make sure it wouldn’t happen again. I heard one player say that, ‘this is just football weather’, in reference to the cold. The players really started to enjoy themselves and it created a whole new morale for the team.

            On Tuesday, it was cold once again, but the team was back to it’s regular practice time, which is in the afternoon. Many of the ‘skill’ positions were wearing gloves. The term ‘skill position’ means receivers, running backs, quarterbacks, etc. They are mainly players that carry the ball. Anyway, due to the sleeves, the players were fumbling quite a bit. This made the defense hoot and holler as they forced many turnovers. The running back said that he was fumbling so much because of the sleeves, and was not going to wear them during this week’s game. He said that, ‘You’re not comfortable when you play anyways, so what would a little cold hurt?’ He did make a good point with that, and didn’t wear sleeves the re