Coaching baseball and football I really emphasized mastering the fundamentals, but I also harped on having the players work on and be the best at three things, their effort, attitude, and focus. The reason was these are the three things we can control—attude, effort, and focus. We won a lot of games because we played harder and gave 100% effort 100% of the time. Being a good teammate means you pick people up and have their back when they make a mistake. We would always say we win as a team and we lose as a team. To me a winning attitude means the players buy into pulling for one another no matter what.
Focus. In sports, focus is so important and when we lose focus and take our eye off of the ball, bad things happen. These same things apply in our everyday life. Winners in pull for other people to succeed knowing that there is plenty of success to go around. Sometimes the difference between people who are making it big is their extra effort. Focus is so important in so many ways (too many to list) but those who do one thing really, really well become the best at it which leads to greatness and great things.
This came up recently because a high school team had the words attitude, effort, and focus on the back of their jerseys. They were also the division champs last year.
