Owning A Place in the Huddle
The identity I choose to step into
My coaching was heavily impacted by experiences as a player. One of the most impactful came from my time with the Glendale Raptors. At the time, we were playing in the Pacific Rugby Premiership and had B-Side team in Division 2. Sometimes we would train together and other times we would train separately. At the end of the session, we would huddle together arms interlocked as a single circle. Each player would then say their name or nickname, there were times with 40-50 players this took a lot of time, but it was something that Coach Bullock didn’t skip, he saw it as integral to connection.
When I left Glendale to take up my role at Stanford, I immediately instituted this practice at the end of each practice. I found it really powerful for each individual to state their own name. But then over the course of time, I built it out a little more because of an individual that was choosing to play rugby even though their friends thought they couldn’t make it. So I evolved the reason for saying the names to be:
“The name you want us to call you as you step into the identity you are choosing in this circle”
This might seem a little weird, but I realized so many different players were evolving their identities as they went through college. They were living away from home, they were experiencing different pressures, they were exposed to different ideas and world views, and they were able experiment with how they interacted with the world around them. So I wanted them to let us know who they were and who they were aspiring to be as a link in the circle.
The result: so many players started to use this opportunity to drive their expression of self as a rugby player. Some players would pick their own nickname, some would acquiesce to the nickname they’d be given, some would use their given name and others would use their last name. The beauty was others would start to use the name each individual was giving in the circle. As group, we would connect with the identity and persona of the rugby player. For some players, this was truly liberating and it allowed them to express parts of their character and personality that were hidden in other aspects of collegiate life.
A few years later, I added a single person’s story before we said our names. The player whose turn would answer three questions:
What do you love about rugby?
Someone you look up to?
A hardship that you have overcome?
Why? I did this because it allowed the circle to get to know the person behind the name. It created a forum for a number of players to share things about themselves and an opportunity for the team to listen to each person. What happened next? The team grew stronger because the connections deepened. Teammates were willing to support each other more and were willing to be a shoulder to lean on. This increased the respect for what each person had overcome to be standing in the circle, which led to more trust.
So my question to y’all, how do you build this connection in your teams? A space that allows for the evolution of identity and pays homage to the story of each individual in your team.