This weekend was Wartburg College's Second Annual One Knight Stand hosted by the Wartburg B-52's (the Ultimate Frisbee team). One Knight Stand was an opportunity for 8 teams from Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota to come together to play a sport that we all love from 10 PM until 6 AM. I am one of the co-captains of the B-52s which meant that I had a part in getting the tournament put together and running. This involved a number of responsibilities over a number of weeks.
For me, since I was in Argentina for the fall semester, I did not help out with very much of the planning for the tournament as much as my co-captains did. Once I returned earlier this month, there was definitely plenty to work on though. For starters, we needed to get in shape again so that we would be able to keep up in the tournament. This meant that we tried to run as much as we could. Since we are just a club, we can't actually force our players to run, but we got them excited for the tournament so they did their part. Additionally, the as captains we needed to make sure that we were working on areas of importance in practices such as defense, throwing, reading the disc, and plays.
What is different about Ultimate Frisbee than any other sport is that the captains act as coaches but play with the team. Therefore, we were the ones to teach people how the better their game and what to do in order to improve as a player. This is challenging sometimes because I have only played Ultimate for two and a half years and I don't always know the answer to people's questions. However, a benefit to having three captains instead of one is that we all can support one another and bring our own strengths to the team. When one person may not be as strong teaching one area, another can pick up the slack. The most important way to get the players to listen to us though is just leading by example. Through leading by example, players can see that we know about what we're talking about by how well we follow what we say and how well it reflects how we play. If we can get the players to see that we know how to play and know what we are doing, we can more effectively lead them. This type of learning by captains teaching the younger players reflects peer learning from the Triangulated Learning article. The younger players learn how to play by seeing the more experienced teammates play. However, we still need to take the traditional approach of learning and teach the players what to do or how to play more effectively.
This weekend through the games, not only did I have to tell my teammates what to do and lead by example, I had to be encouraging and make sure that nobody got too down on themselves. This can be hard for me to do because I easily get down on myself when I don't play well because I am so competitive. It also didn't help that we were easily beat in our first two games. My approach to keeping the spirits high was focusing more one the positive of what we were doing rather than being negative about what we were doing. By qualifying the good and the bad, we were able to work on certain areas and play better even though we ended up losing. I had to let go of my initial anger and frustration and realize that that wasn't helping the team. I needed to swallow my pride and focus on the team rather than myself. Additionally, my leadership styles had to be adaptive. Some players need my recognition and feedback in order to know how they are doing while others can comfortably assess how their doing but just need a little encouragement every once in a while. As a leader, I needed to recognize which players responded which way and act accordingly.
Now that the tournament is over, I think we only have room to grow. We saw what some of our weaknesses were and gained some tournament experience. In terms of being a leader of the team, I have finally had my first test of challenges of being captain and acknowledge that before the next tournament there needs to be some changes.
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