Confidence Buddies

Filling the air with +E

As I discussed in the Confidence Is Key section, confidence is the essential ingredient to high level player and team performance.  All coaches should make it a point to try and build player confidence on an on-going basis. 

With the 17 players on this team, it is not always easy for me to give all the girls the needed attention each and every practice in order to constantly be raising their confidence levels.  So, this year I've implemented Confidence Buddies. 

At the start of each practice or game I pair the girls off.  If we have odd numbers I just make one group of three.  Within each group, each of the girls is the  Confidence Buddy of her partner(s).  Confidence Buddies are given the job of building the confidence level of their partner that day by giving them positive feedback and encouragement for the entire training session/game.  During the training session/game I ask random girls what their Confidence Buddy has done for them today. 

The one risk early on with this Confidence Buddy idea was that the girls would make light of the compliments and over-praise their Buddy.  For example, one partner might say "Nice pass!" to their Confidence Buddy when their Confidence Buddy KNOWS that it wasn't a good pass.  I had to talk to the girls about the danger of praising teammates for good play just for the sake of saying something.  The girls are getting to a point when they realize if they should have/could have done better and they actually feel worse if someone praises them for something that really doesn't deserve any praise.  Encouragement is what is needed at this point, or simply a smile from the Confidence Buddy and our Leave It Behind trigger (see Failure Is An Option).

I've noticed that the addition of the Confidence Buddy system has led to players being more positive to girls who are not their assigned Confidence Buddy.  This has led to girls feeling more comfortable in training sessions and games, and players have begun to take more risks.  Again, I don't have any real data to back this up with, it's just something that I think I've noticed. 

Another benefit to the Confidence Buddy system is that since the girls hear a ton of positive and encouraging feedback, they begin to know what specific feedback works and what doesn't work.  Armed with this information, the feedback that they in turn give out is more effective.  Though each girl is different and different things make different girls tick, the overall quality of the commentary this year among teammates is much improved.

The idea here is to continually work to increase the positive energy (+E) surrounding our team.  What I've found since starting this Confidence Buddy concept is that the girls are becoming more used to giving positive feedback to teammates, even when there are mistakes made.  We play at a high level and all the girls on this team are competitive.  I want to get the point across to them that if they get on each other and use negative tones, there is no way that this will spur the recipient onto to want to work harder.  Rather, the recipient of the negative tone will likely close up, shut people out, and begin thinking negative thoughts.  This will take away from the individual player's performance and will thus weaken our entire team's performance.