Every family argues. Your future team will too.
On the peer-to-peer conversation most players never learn to have
Around the country this week, recruits on official visits are being told “we are a family here”.
Of course, coaches trying to recruit you want to give you all the good vibes and make campus feel like a home away from home.
But the bit they won’t “sell” is that every family argues and bickers. And the dysfunction that can often see blood relatives not talking to each other is often present in sports teams too.
The midseason relationship slump
Even teams that are tight off the field will encounter problems socially when things go wrong in games.
Early to mid-October is when the cracks often start to appear. Eight to ten weeks of living in each other’s pockets and the grind of the season will challenge even those with the strongest team culture and relationships, as things that had stayed on the field start bleeding into friendships.
“We compartmentalized well, until suddenly we couldn’t compartmentalize at all,” was how a leader of a top-25 program once put it to me.
She gave me a specific example. A player was going rogue from the team’s forward leading system - not following the movement patterns the coaches had prescribed, and everyone else had bought into.
Early on, teammates would let it go. Annoying, but fine. Then it kept happening. Results started suffering. And suddenly it wasn’t just frustrating, it was personal. People were pissed off, not just at the behavior, but at the person.
And they were uncertain about how to address it without blowing up the friendship.
It turns out, you can play team sports for ten years and never be taught how to have a hard conversation with a teammate. The one where you have to tell someone you care about that something they’re doing is affecting the team - and do it in a way that doesn’t make everything worse.
Conflict Resolution 101
What I told her was pretty simple. If you have a strong relationship with someone, that’s actually permission to hold them accountable, not a reason to stay quiet. They already know you care about them off the field, and there’s trust in the friendship that you can lean on.
Go to her and tell her there’s something hockey-related you need to raise. Signal upfront that it might not be easy to hear, but that it comes from a place of wanting to help her and the team. Use “when you do this, I feel that” rather than “you always do this.” Ask if there’s anything you can do to support her or help find a mutually agreeable solution.
You might still get a defensive reaction the first time, but it’s unlikely to break the friendship. And often, a few days later, things shift.
For coaches who spend time educating their players on this, it can feel like Groundhog Day in leadership group meetings. You sit down with the captains and they bring up a problem - this player did this, that situation got out of hand - and the coaches ask what they’d done about it. Usually the answer was nothing, or “I didn’t know what to do”.
The standard you walk past is the new one you accept. That was the message, over and over again. You give them some tools and ideas like the ones in this newsletter, and hope they eventually take action.
When the teams I’ve been involved with did have a framework - when players had been given the tools and actually used them - the problems typically got resolved. Not always cleanly, not always quickly. Sometimes the first conversation didn’t land, and someone else had to follow up. Occasionally, it took an arm around the shoulder a few days later. But it got resolved, without coaches having to step in, and without the friendship breaking.
Culture eats talent
The most successful teams I’ve been involved with weren’t just the most talented. They were the ones where the accountability spread furthest.
It starts with coaches caring about this stuff and being intentional about it. It gets stronger when the captains decide to own it, and accept the burden of leadership. But it’s most powerful when the whole team buys in - when everyone feels the permission to have the hard conversation, and the responsibility to have it.
Those were the best teams I’ve worked with. Not because of the players we had, but because of what they were willing to do when things got difficult.
All of this is relevant to recruiting in a way that doesn’t get talked about enough.
When you visit a campus and try to get a feel for the team culture, this is part of what you’re actually sensing. Do these players hold each other accountable, or do they let things slide? Is the hard conversation something that happens here, or something everyone avoids?
And when you arrive - whenever that is - you’re going to encounter conflict with teammates. Not because the program is broken or the culture is bad. Because that’s what happens when you put a group of driven, competitive people in close quarters for months at a time.
When they tell you they’re like a “family”, make sure you’re choosing a family that addresses conflicts in the open rather than behind your back.
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