Help your team recover from disappointment: the raw egg or the tennis ball?
The Detroit Lions haven’t won a road game in three years and were on the verge of doing so until the unforeseen happened. In the final seconds of the game, the Lions’ backup quarterback threw a long pass and his star receiver jumped into the air, caught the ball and celebrated her game-winning touchdown. The umpire then blew the whistle and signaled “no catch” due to a little-known possession rule that the catcher had violated. As a closet Lions fan, I was disappointed that my team couldn’t snap their losing streak. And as a coach, I was wondering what I would do to keep my team focused, motivated and forward-thinking after such a heartbreaking loss.
Disappointment is built into both athletics and life, and it’s how we deal with disappointment that matters. What if we as coaches could influence the lens through which our teams view disappointments? Well I think we can! It’s our job to frame disappointments (losses, injuries, etc.) in a way that empowers our teams instead of leaving them helpless. That’s where the title of this article comes from… it’s the choice our athletes face every time they face adversity or disappointment. They can be the egg that gets completely squashed when dropped or they can be the bouncing tennis ball. So check out my ideas for recovering from disappointment so that one disappointment doesn’t turn into many.
3 strategic tips to help your team recover from disappointment
Recovery Tip #1: Include the Whole Team
Whether it’s a basketball player missing his free throws or the soccer player in the example above, they weren’t the only reason his team lost the game. Just as it’s never a player’s fault for a win, it’s never a player’s fault for a disappointing loss. The first thing a coach can do after a disappointment is to remind the team that they are indeed a team and that they go up or down together.
Recovery Tip #2: Look to the Future
No matter how sad, angry, mad, shocked or whatever emotion your team feels after a disappointment, they can’t change it. They can cry, they can scream, they can stare in disbelief… but the result is still the same. The disappointment is still there. So what’s a coach to do? Look ahead and use disappointment as a starting point. Whether your athletes need to learn the rules of the game (using my football example from the opening) or how to manage their emotions in critical moments, those are great places to start in terms of turning a disappointment around.
Recovery tip #3: Fix the error
If your volleyball player missed the match point serve so badly that you know she was scared to death at the time, it’s time to add some pressure situations in practice so you can bolster her mental game. We can’t recreate the pressure of competition during the game, but we can give you tips to control your thinking about it so that it’s positive instead of negative. We have to equip our athletes to bounce back from the disappointments that are bound to come over the course of the season.
Here are my simple tips to help your team bounce back from disappointment. The choice is truly yours. They can be the egg, which crumbles in the face of adversity, or the tennis ball, which will keep bouncing no matter how hard it falls.
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