Character Development Lesson Nine

What About Me? 

The team concept is a difficult thing to understand and accept for some athletes.  It is human nature to be selfish, to always think of what’s in it for ME.  We have to work at being unselfish.  The most difficult thing for individuals to do when they are part of a team is to sacrifice.  It’s so easy to become selfish in a team environment; to play for me.   It’s very vulnerable to drop your guard and say, “This is who I am and I’m going to open up and give myself to you.”  But that’s exactly what you’ve got to do.  Willing sacrifice is the great paradox.  Zig Ziglar says it like this: “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

Placing team goals ahead of individual goals is the team concept.   Every winning team has it and every losing team does not have it.  An individual must unselfishly sacrifice his own personal wants and wishes for the good of the team.

Players must learn to cooperate and respect each other and build each other up.  They must be interested in helping and improving each other.  This is’how team spirit and morale are developed.  When you have a group of young people working hard together for a common goal, you are tough to beat.

A few days before the Super Bowl, Assistant Head Coach Richie Petitbon tried to put his finger on what made the 1991 Washington Redskins unique.

“This tends to be a selfish game, full of selfish stars,” Petitbon explained, “but every once in a while a ball club gets totally caught up in the team concept.   Egos get submerged. Everything is done for the good of the group.”

Such was the case with the Redskins, Super Bowl champions after Sunday’s 37-24 smashing of the Buffalo Bills.

“This team really had great, great chemistry,” Coach Joe Gibbs said. “The players had a great, great feeling for one another.   From Day 1, I rarely got upset with our team.  I very rarely had to deal with off-the-field stuff.  It was truly a team.  It was not just a bunch of stars.”

I would like to share a poem with you that I believe points out how selfishness can destroy. We all must learn that we have got to give up something in the immediate to attract something even better in the future.  Without sacrifice you’ll never know your full potential.

THE COLD WITHIN

Six men were trapped by circumstances in bleak and bitter cold

Each one possessed a stick of wood, or so the story’s told. 

The dying fire in need of logs, the first man held his back 

Because of faces round the fire, he noticed one was black.

 The second man saw not one of his own local church

And couldn’t bring himself to give the first his stick of birch.

 The poor man sat in tattered clothes and gave his coat a hitch.

 Why should he give up his log to warm the idle rich? 

The rich man sat and thought of all the wealth he had in store 

And how to keep what he had earned from the lazy, shiftless poor. 

The black man’s face spoke revenge and the fire passed from his sight. 

Because he saw in his stick of wood a chance to spite the white. 

The last man of this forlorn group did naught except for gain, 

Only to those who gave to him was how he played the game. 

Their logs held tight in death’s still hands was proof of human sin. 

They didn’t die from cold without; they died from The Cold Within.

Author Unknown