I’ve thought a lot about coaching the football team over the last little while, because of the successes that we’ve had, but I have spared you the fact that we won another tournament last Sunday (on another penalty shootout and this time Callum scored!)
A part of the experience that I’ve brought in to running the boys football team is experience from being a basketball player and in being a basketball player, one of the things we always did before we started a game was to shout, “The Shout”.
Do you know the one? The 1,2,3…. Shout whatever you want, and so we do that as a team before we go out to each half of football and each game of the tournament.
Josh gets to put his hand on the bottom, because he is the Captain, everybody else, he turns his hand upwards and everybody else places theirs on top of that and then everybody crowds in, including the coaches and we start it by Josh shouting 1,2,3 and then we would shout ‘MUSTANGS’ as loud as we could.
You can tell a lot about how that shout sounds as to how everybody feels, it developed overtime as the boys got more into it, and so now it goes like this.
I say "Who are we?” Everybody shouts “Mustangs!”
I say It again, they shout it louder, I say It again they shout it louder, and then Josh shouts, “1,2,3!” and then we shout.
In the cup final 10 days ago, we were given a changing room and everything (it was proper professional). While we were in that changing room, we could hear some shouts coming from the oppositions changing room and some noise as they were getting excited, at the end of our team talk, before we went out, we did ‘our shout’ ad it was the loudest ever heard, both because of the excitement and the energy that we had and also because we were in the changing room (it must have scared the s**t out of the team next door).
It means something, that shout there, it means something to all of us, not because we shout it, but because we’ve shared it.
We’ve used it on the bad days, and we’ve used it on the really good days, and we can use it to gage how we feel, to tell ourselves off and to big ourselves up.
Nothing worthwhile was ever easy, nor does it come quickly, I remember the basketball shouts, I remember the half time talks, which ended in the biggest shout you could imagine as we race back on to the court to re-engage in battle.
My boy’s will remember that too. It’s a good lesson to learn, building within any team takes time and persistence and shared experience.
Blog Post Number - 2023
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