What contribution can sports psychology make to our understanding of successful teams?
I think it would be great if I could say that we know that successful teams have the following characteristics but there isn’t really as clear-cut an answer to that question as you might expect. So, for instance, it’s often thought that team bonding exercises are good but a lot of the time going away for training camps and having bonding exercise with players doesn’t work as well as you might expect, because the assumption is that players have to like each other and fight to the death for each other for a team to be successful but that’s not really true. Some players just don’t get on with others but provided they have a common goal, personal relationships are not crucial to a team’s success. John Woodn, one of the USA’s most successful basketball coaches, once said that teams should never let what they can’t do (by way of skill or talent) interfere with what they CAN do (by way of effort and commitment). For teams, success comes in ‘cans’ not ‘can’ts’.
