CrossFit Athletic Group

This is a screenshot from the game I was scouting for our 17u team yesterday. One of these teams is named Team United, and one of them is named The Skills Factory.

I bet you can tell which one is which.

I'm not really sure why I felt so compelled to share this on a CrossFit site, because the takeaway is not as simple as The Team That Stays Together Wins Together; just yesterday our 15u got boned by a team much less together than them but with the third best player in the country.

A picture can also be misleading; TSF's players may have been down on the other end of the court when the timeout was called, and Team United just happened to be right by the bench. It also could have been a blowout, in which case the losing team might just want to head home and the winning team wanted to escape without injury.

Now that I think about it, I guess the reason I wanted to share this was just to say that I noticed it. And not as a brag, but as more of a wake-up to whoever reads this in any situation you think can parallel. I'm a volunteer coach with a very good but not great understanding of basketball doing this from a computer screen. But the sidelines in all these games are shoulder-to-shoulder with coaches from Indiana, North Carolina, Duke, Kentucky, all the way down to OU, UDM, and Eastern. Imagine someone who makes a living judging basketball players sitting there in person; imagine all the other subconscious habits they caught that these players were not aware of.

One of the things I've noticed while coaching at the Champions Club post-lockdown is how often something non fitness-related holds back performance; Mrs. Carey's self-proclaimed lack of endurance has nothing to do with her lungs. In basketball it's... partially true. Like I said, gifted players are just gifted for the most part. But when you're in an even playing field with other gifted players and it's a tie game in the 4th quarter, little things like getting to the huddle quickly, energy on the bench, and coach's body language make a huge difference.

Sprinting to the huddle, energy on the bench, and coach's body language aren't the direct thing that makes that team win, but they do reflect something deeper down that can't be kept in a statistic or ranked on 247sports, but is obvious to everyone.