My time here has been incredibly enjoyable. From interviewing athletes, to staff ice cream parties, and running like mad all over campus to get to interviews on time, working for “The Bengal” has been an incredible experience.
I do have some parting advice and notes based on my short time here. The first has to do with what kinds of teams win games. I’ve interviewed players from every type of sport imaginable: volleyball, football, tennis, track, cross country, golf and more. What I have found is that it is easy to predict success based solely on the things you hear during an interview.
The teams that do well are the ones that have good attitudes across the board. Even a bad team can perform up to the level of the competition with the right frame of mind. 90 percent of the time when I ask an athlete what the most important part of the game they play is, he or she will say mental toughness.
Mental toughness is hard to track just by watching the team play, but it’s easy to see in the demeanors of players. One thing that I’ve learned, though, is that coaches can have a tremendous impact on the attitude of a team.
Take the men’s basketball team last year as an example. They started off the year poorly under former head coach Jim O’Brien and most of the players that I interviewed seemed to have a negative outlook on the season.
Once Deanne Martin took over, it was a new team in every sense of the word. Athletes had confidence again; there was a system and stability. A team that may not have won more than five games under Coach O’Brien was suddenly knocking off teams like Weber State and made it to the Big Sky tournament. That’s a big deal and the reason it happened was because the players changed their attitudes, not because the coach changed the system; Deanne didn’t have time to drastically alter what O’Brien had done.
The other thing that I have learned is that fan support is incredibly vital to a team’s confidence level and its performance. Take volleyball as an example. Sure, they added Tressa Lyman to the rotation, but largely it is a group of the same players from last year and they are dominating Big Sky play. What has been the difference? Fan support. The players are motivated to do well in front of the fans and do well away from home to keep spectators wanting to come back for more. So please, go support your athletes.
