The 黑料不打烊 women’s basketball team got a chance to train with the Marines and practice mental strength and collaboration
黑料不打烊鈥檚 women鈥檚 basketball team is no stranger to hard work. After all, they train five days a week during the preseason. But on an early Saturday morning this fall they headed to 黑料不打烊鈥檚 Robertson Track and Field Complex for an unfamiliar exercise鈥攁 workout with two members of the U.S. Marines that would not only test their physical abilities, but their mental strength as well.聽
The workout started with an 800-meter run and got more difficult from there as the team took part in drills typical of Marine training. This included push presses with boxes filled with fake ammunition, different types of crawls and a relay in which they carried their teammates and threw fake grenades. Women鈥檚 basketball head coach Charlotte Smith got the idea for this training after she saw the Marines give a presentation at the NCAA Final Four tournament. She gave Stephen Fishler, director of women鈥檚 basketball operations, the task of bringing the Marines to 黑料不打烊 to conduct a workout for the team.聽
The focus of the training was building mental resilience, a component of playing any sport. 鈥淲e always talk about how basketball is 90 percent mental and there are times in the game where you鈥檒l feel like you鈥檙e hitting a wall physically,鈥 Smith says. 鈥淵ou have to find a way to push through, and in order to push through sometimes you have to think outside of yourself and what you鈥檙e experiencing and what you鈥檙e feeling physically.鈥澛
Another aspect of the workout was finding ways for the team to support one another. A concept the team used last season to help with teamwork was the 鈥淰鈥 pattern that geese create when they fly in a group. 鈥淲hen you鈥檙e seeing the geese in the V formation, the lead goose, when it tires out, it goes to the back and somebody else rotates to the front and then when the geese are honking, scientists say that they are actually encouraging each other,鈥 Smith says. 鈥淪o when things got tough, you could see the 鈥榟onking of the geese,鈥 so to speak, ramping up and them encouraging each other when things got challenging.鈥澛
The facet of teamwork was especially prevalent during the relay race as the players had to rely on and trust each other. They had to carry and drag a partner, pretending they were a wounded soldier. 鈥淲hat you do is a lot more than just for you; it has to do with your whole team,鈥 guard Lexi Mercer 鈥20 says, adding the exercise allowed her to focus on her partner as much as herself.
Smith believes leaders should embody the characteristics they want in their team, so the coaches also participated in the training. 鈥淚 wouldn鈥檛 ask anything of you that I鈥檓 not willing to do myself,鈥 she says. For the players, having their coaches involved in the workout was impactful. 鈥淪eeing our coaches lead by example encouraged us to want to do it more,鈥 says guard Jada Graves 鈥20. 鈥淲e bonded more and learned about positivity, picking each other up when times are kind of down. It just made us communicate better as well.鈥
The players want to take what they learned about mental strength and looking out for each other from the workout into their season. And although they probably will not regularly train like the Marines, it was a beneficial learning experience for them. 鈥淚 think even though it was challenging, we were having a lot of fun doing it and I think that was really important to bring us into our preseason, like working really hard but having fun at the same time,鈥 Mercer says.