Journal #14, Week 5

My biggest leadership/management mistake was...

I am a proud, yet humble person at times. I am not going to ever say that I was a perfect leader or manager, nor do I think I ever truly experienced greatness. it is quite easy for me to think back and realize the many blunders I made along the way. Pegging one that was the biggest mistake is quite difficult and I learned many more lessons from failing than I ever did through winning or succeeding.

Just to grab one mistake I made recently will show what I mean. My girls high school tennis team played a school earlier this season that we had dominated last year. I knew that their team was young last year and hadn't lost much in terms of talented players to graduation. We entered this match expecting our results to mirror last year's even though we had lost 5 significant players from last year's team.

Going into the match, my goal was for our team to play confidently and be assured that we were the better team. I had advised the girls that we should try to play aggressively and end matches quickly as to not let the other team feel they were ever in the match.

Our young opponents showed up hungry and had worked really hard in the off season to improve their talent level. My girls, thinking they were much better than they were, grew frustrated that they were unable to win as easily as they had anticipated. My court side coaching became a process of saying things like, "they are better than we anticipated, we have to play harder and smarter to get the results we want." My girls lacked the ability to overcome the change in talent level they had expected and a couple ended up losing their individual matches even though we won the overall team match.

Our next match is against a similar type of team. We beat York High School soundly last year with our more veteran team. York returns all but one player and this time I will have a better mindset going into the match. I will still tell them that they should have confidence in the fact that they are the better players. However, I will caution them not to let their over confidence get out of control. We must play to 100% of our ability if we want to attain team success in this match