On being a teammate................

     Faithful readers will have noted that I was back in the Philadelphia area last weekend.  The reason behind the trip was a bit of nostalgia.  My high school soccer team (Lower Merion) won (what passed for at that time) the state championship in 1968 (my senior year).  The school's soccer hall of fame organization wanted to induct a few members from that team into said Hall of Fame.  In an act of great kindness and generosity, those contacted about such an induction said that it would be impossible to select a few members.  The 1968 soccer team was a TEAM, and that they should induct the team, not individuals.  That is what happened.  Last weekend was the induction ceremony.

Forty-five years later, still looking pretty good

      As a bit of background.  I love being a member of a highly functioning team.  I played scholastic soccer for six years and competitive lacrosse for ten years (plus another fifteen years of coaching college lacrosse).  I've seen many iterations of teams.  In my mind, they all get compared to the Lower Merion High School soccer team of 1968.  It is a high standard.  I should tell you that I wasn't a very good soccer player, and my playing time could be generously characterized as limited, but no one enjoyed that season and being on that team more than me.  The camaraderie, the friendships, the bus rides and the locker room, the first string vs the "bomb squad" battles in practice, the incredible amount of running we did in training - it was all great.

     None of this was slated to show up on this blog, until I read this article about super-stars, weak-links, and the importance of creating a TEAM.  A brief excerpt:

"It was not until the 1990s that psychologists began to investigate the reasons behind Köhler's findings. They found two causes for the effect: a social comparison process, where individuals perform better when working with a more capable partner, and an "indispensability" condition in which individuals do not want to hold back the group and feel that their contribution is crucial to collective performance."