Next on the tee
T-E-A-M, that spells team.
You can ask any first or second grader that you know to spell team, and hopefully, if our educational system isn’t completely failing, they will spell it that way. It really doesn’t take an English major to tell you that there is not an “i” in the middle of team.
This archived article was written by: David Osborne Jr.
T-E-A-M, that spells team.
You can ask any first or second grader that you know to spell team, and hopefully, if our educational system isn’t completely failing, they will spell it that way. It really doesn’t take an English major to tell you that there is not an “i” in the middle of team.
We are in the middle of baseball season and football season started last weekend. With all of this going on, I was thinking about what makes these sports so great. It isn’t necessarily watching a batter hit a walk-off home run in baseball or watching a football player run a kickoff back for a touchdown as time expires on the clock. The most thrilling thing about these sports is watching two different teams try their hardest to win.
A team is like a clock, from the outside, looking at the face of the clock you cannot see everything that is going on inside to make it all work, you just see the hands move to tell you what time it is. But if you remove the face and take a glance at the inside, you will see cogs and gears that are different in many ways all working together for the outcome that we see when we go back and look at the face. Teams are the same basic concept, many different moving parts that all work together to make the whole machine work, and hopefully win.
Last basketball season, I had the chance to go up to Idaho to watch the men’s basketball team play in their conference tournament game. Unfortunately, we lost the very first game that we played against Salt Lake Community College, and I admit that I was rather bummed. The lesson I learned that night will never leave me though.
While sitting in the lobby of the hotel with the assistant coaches, I learned an important concept about teams. Assistant coach Chris Skinkis, was blaming himself for the loss, saying he hadn’t worked hard enough and hadn’t been a good enough coach because the team lost. The other assistant coach, Chris Romney said that it was Skinkis’ fault because he made the entire team miss their free-throws and jump shots. What I realized was that it wasn’t the coaches’ fault that they lost, it was the teams’. The old adage, “win as a team, lose as a team” had never hit me so hard.
Teams that work together, play together and either fall short or are enshrined in glory together. Just like a sports team, we all have a group that we work with, whether it be an athletic team, an academic group, or even just the group that we hang out with. We are a part of the cogs and gears in that group helping to drive and work the machine that we are.
T-E-A-M; it is that simple, a group working together and no individuals.
This is why teams have been on the tee.
