Team composition is something I'd like to discuss this week. Obviously, it's important to have a roster that can meet the 23 rule each week. But, it's also important to have enough players on your roster to cover for sickness, vacation, overtime work, concert tickets or whatever other reason someone might need a night off from league. Once you have 8 players, you aren't completely set. The next thing you need to do is learn everyone's schedules. Someone has to play early. Someone else can't stay late. Someone is leaving town next week and can't play at all. And then someone else has the flu. Juggling line ups is probably one of the most difficult things to being a team captain, and a victory for the team captain is sometimes nothing more than managing to find 5 people that can play that night. In the 2000's, being a team captain is certainly a lot easier than when I was captaining teams regularly back in the early 90's, where we didn't have cell phones with group texting and web sites to post schedules. Everyone was just expected to be there unless you got a call. Even with the technology, the captain doesn't receive the respect they deserve when it comes to getting 5 people there each week.
Once you get that 8 person roster together, the next hurdle is finding a way to keep that roster together. People do need to leave their teams for one reason or another (work, school, moved away, found a boyfriend that doesn't shoot pool, etc.). The best way to be able to replace players is to always present yourself as friendly and easy going. Do not make the new guy/girl buy shots for the entire team. Make the new person glad they joined your team, so maybe the team needs to buy him/her shots or a drink. The biggest turnover on teams are the low skilled players. These players are the ones that didn't think they were good enough to be on a pool team in the first place, yet are some of the most valuable players to the makeup of your team. In other words, without that lower skilled player, the higher skilled player might not be able to play and still meet the 23 rule. And why are these players leaving? If you have a high turnover of these players, it's possible you just aren't making them feel valuable enough to your team to want to stay. Being too competitive can scare them away. Lecturing them when they followed the cue ball into the pocket might make you feel better, but it does nothing to create harmony with them. Many of them feel inferior to not only the higher skilled players, but to the seasoned veterans who don't take the time to teach and assure them that mistakes are likely and that they went through those same mistakes then, and still do it now occasionally. Another thing I have seen teams do is play their skill level 2 or 3 in the final match of a tournament or playoff match, where they feel like all of the pressure to win falls on them. If you know you are going to have to play them, it's best to play them early. Sometimes there is just no avoiding it, but when it happens, you have to make sure the player knows that if they lose, it's not their fault.
If you are having a high volume turnover of players on your team, think about what you might be able to do as a captain to hang onto these players longer. A personality clash is a legitimate reason for someone to move along, but if they feel you aren't nice on league night and they have invited too much stress into their life by playing on a pool league, they are sure to venture into some other leisure time that is less stressful. Each person that pays their yearly membership deserves to feel like they haven't made a mistake by joining the one pool league that caters to beginners in our sport.
When scoring matches, PLEASE make sure you double check membership numbers, total the innings and put the complete scores in for each match. Part of your weekly bonus points is a complete and accurate score sheet. Lindsay was on vacation this week, and while I was doing the scoring, I couldn't believe how many times membership numbers were written in incorrectly or not at all. Please double check your work. Thanks!