This past winter I did something I’d highly recommend for any head coach: I joined the coaching staff of a different sport. Before the beginning of my 17^th season as a water polo coach this Fall, our school’s soccer coach invited me to join his staff as the goalkeeper coach that Winter. As a big fan of both soccer and goalkeeping, and also respecting this coach on and off the field, I obliged.

Being an assistant coach on this team absolved me from the multitude of duties assumed by a team’s head coach. Because I wasn’t preoccupied with X’s and O’s, scheduling field time, and all other stresses of running a program, I could focus solely on coaching, and this also allowed me to hone my lens as a sort of sports anthropologist. As such, I paid close attention to what this coach did in all the subtle ways coaches do things, in order to discover just how this program had been so prosperous throughout his four year tenure. While this coach knew soccer strategy as well as any coach out there, what differentiated our team was something much more subtle: our culture.

What follows is one of my now-favorite examples of a true team-based culture, which I experienced during this soccer season:

Losing 1-0 in the quarterfinals of the Division Playoffs, with 15 minutes remaining, the bench players self-organized, surrounding the field, scurrying to retrieve out-of-bounds balls in order to keep the ball in play. With literally seconds remaining, we scored a goal to tie the game. The game went into overtime and we eventually won in an incredible penalty kick shoot out. (Stay tuned, below, to see what happened after that.) 

This anecdote demonstrates the culture our coach created on this particular team. Instead of remaining on the bench sitting and watching or feeling sorry for themselves, these players found a way to help their team. It is a matter of fact that, without this effort, we would have lost, ending our season. This culture was created intentionally, with the coach consistently commending and empowering the bench players following games and during pre-practice talks with the team.

Now, on to what followed the penalty kicks:

Our goalkeeper saved three of our opponents’ five shots while the opposing goalie stopped just two. In front of hundreds of fans and students, many cheering for the opposing host team, we won, advancing us to the semifinals. Following our goalie’s third save which clinched the win, and still pumped full of adrenaline while his team circled to celebrate with great fervor, he headed in another direction, toward the opposing goalie—who had understandably slumped into a crouch at the corner of the field, removed from everyone—and reached out his hand in consolation.

Coaches sometimes forget something obvious: Coaches are in charge of the team culture. We choose what we celebrate and what we ignore, what gets rewarded and what is frowned upon, and how we interact with everyone in the program. It is from a well-entrenched culture that magical moments like those above occur.

Doing all of this requires a foundation built consciously on proper values. From there, it’s not so much what you do, but, instead, how you do it. You can’t just say to a novice coach, “You should jump up and down three times when a player overcomes a bad call by the referee and continues playing his heart out,” or, “You should hug your player when he makes an obvious mistake in front of the home crowd.” Good coaching results from work months and years ahead of time. It results from establishing a foundation—a culture—and then acting accordingly.

I started this article at the season’s end. To circle back to the beginning would require me to return to the previous year’s end-of-season banquet, because this is when culture creation began for this particular team.

And so, at this season’s end-of-season banquet, I was happy to see that the two instances mentioned above, along with others like it, were highlighted as the greatest moments of the season. While goals scored and saves made were occasionally mentioned, the things most celebrated were moments of character. Character like that displayed by our senior goalie who was beaten out by a junior for the starting spot, yet came to practice every day, worked as hard as any starter, and supported his team with his whole heart. That’s culture.

The messaging at the banquet was clear, without ever having to say it explicitly because these actions and anecdotes demonstrate it better than words or slogans ever could. The underclassmen and the parents at that event could only come away with some version of this:

In this program, we value a team-based approach founded on empathy and care for one’s teammates, competitors, coaches, and the game itself.

You could put a version of that on a poster or a team t-shirt but it wouldn’t signify a quarter of what this team now understands it to mean. And next year, when this group reconvenes, the upperclassmen will truly know the culture and will transmit it to the next group of freshmen both subtly and in the form of other similarly moving demonstrations we can’t yet imagine. And that group of young men will again, no doubt, have yet another enriching and successful season.

In our ever-growing me-first Facebook culture, youth sports coaches have a rare opportunity—maybe, even, a duty—to provide adolescents with an opportunity to celebrate something much more profound. This sort of team culture not only results in more victories but also yields better people. Not to mention, it’s just a lot more fun and rewarding to be around.