Introducing Teammate
This is a free preview of our new weekly email from The Daily Coach. Teammate is published every Saturday morning and goes beyond leadership, honoring and highlighting what it means to be a great teammate.
Each Teammate email is shorter than The Daily Coach and is meant to help coaches and leaders at any level inspire their players & staff and reinforce their message through short text, quotes, and clips. Easily copy and paste into WhatsApp, a text, or Teamworks chat.
The Daily Coach newsletter will remain completely free and will continue arriving in your inbox every day.
Teammate will be a paid publication beginning in August.
Read the free preview below
Marcus Smart: Your Energy on the Bench Is a Choice
Marcus Smart was not always a starter. There were stretches early in his career when he sat for long minutes, sometimes entire quarters, watching Rajon Rondo or Avery Bradley run the point.
He never checked out. Film from those seasons shows him on the edge of the bench nearly every possession: hands on his knees, calling switches, pumping his fist when shots fell.
One Boston writer noted that Smart’s sideline presence was so consistent that teammates said they could feel it. Not metaphorically, but literally, they could hear him, see him, sense the energy from the bench. When Smart took over as a starter, he was already leading. The role just caught up to him.
Here’s Smart mic’d up during the 2022 NBA Finals (0:31)
Many teammates decide how to behave based on whether they’re playing. Smart decided how to behave, and the playing followed.
Why It Matters
Your bench energy is visible. Your teammates feel it, even when you think you’re invisible.
Coaches are often tracking who stays locked in when they’re not in the game. That’s usually what decides the rotation.
Culture is built in the margins. Great teammates lead in the moments nobody tracks.
The Teammate Standard
You don’t have to be in the game to affect the game.
Marcus Smart didn’t wait to be a starter before he started leading. He was locked in on the bench every single possession: hands on his knees, calling switches, fist pumping on every shot, even when he sat for whole quarters.
His teammates said they could literally feel his energy from the sideline. He didn’t lead because of his role. He led, and the role followed.
What does your energy look like when you’re on the bench?
The Scouting Report powered by RADical Hope
Six months after completing peer-to-peer mental health programming, students reported the following skills as most useful in their day-to-day lives:
“As a leader of my team, I've found that the emotional intelligence that I was able to identify has greatly helped me interact with my teammates when they are going through tough times... It gave me stress management tools and helped me develop the self-awareness necessary to know when to use these tools. “
— Denison University Student-Athlete
To help The Daily Coach readers better understand the young people you lead, we’ve partnered with RADical Hope. Read The Daily Coach every Saturday for key insights collected by RADical Hope’s athlete surveys, conducted across the 85 colleges, universities, professional sports teams and community organizations they support.
