Team Culture Benefits Students, Athletes

Team culture’s positive or negative impacts can define the performance and output of the team, it is essential to take positive team culture and use it as a method to enhance the team’s cohesion and ability to work together.

Design team leader Alana Brajdic wrote, “A team culture is made up of the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours shared by a team.” Brajdic implemented a team day program on Fridays for her team, and found improvement in her team’s ability to combat struggles.

For physical education teacher and football coach John Redders, simply being in the right mindset greatly impacts how he feels and his perseverance. “I walked in [to the weightroom] with a mindset,” Redders said. “And walked out feeling stronger without working out.” This kind of feeling drastically improves performance and how hard athletes work.

From a personal experience, it is much easier to run farther, faster by simply being in the presence of other runners. It is astonishing how different the same work out is, while doing it with a team, compared to alone.

These positive benefits do not just apply to making exercise feel easier. It can make school work easier as well.

Study groups are a group of students who meet to work together. Logistically it can be very difficult to make sure all of the group members are in the same experience, and age group. However they do not have to be, simply by setting the right environment and having a supportive culture between the members, who may or may not help each other with the school work, can make the work feel easier.

According to sports writer Mim Haig this occurs in sports and education because of an aligned team culture. A group of people working together towards a common, aligned goal engages the people of the group into their individual work. Haigh wrote engagement metrics for aligned team cultures “are markedly higher than those in less aligned cultures.”

The idea of this is that a general communion of people working in the same physical or virtual location can make work feel easier. This matches the definition of team culture, regardless of whether or not the people are a part of a team or strangers.

HUHS should implement more team culture to further enhance sports and educational performance. If students see their peers working, it will encourage them to do the same. A general school spirit of working hard will help both athletes and students.

Positive team culture can be accomplished through implementing study group sessions after school, post - COVID of course. There could be awards for students who display good team culture and support other students in such sessions. This will give students an outlet to get their work done.