Team IV: Armament and Confidence

I’m gonna let you all in on a little secret I’ve picked up: The marker’s probably the least important part of a player. Check this out: given an equal playing field on all levels, a team with better equipment has the same chance of winning as a rental team, it’s all in how the equipment is used, how the team works together and how willing that team is to go over the top and try risky things to get the job down. So, for this article, we’re foregoing any discussion on how to improve your team’s armament. Yes, liking your marker and it being in good repair are important, but often, you can get around all that with having a little confidence.
Confidence in relation to paintball comes in three forms: Self confidence, Command confidence and Team confidence (Chemistry). These three work together in order to form how willing and ready a player is on field. Improving these three, especially as a group, is the key to overcoming obstacles on and off the field.
Self confidence, we’ve heard this for years, haven’t we? Its what makes people tick, caused bullying in elementary and middle school and what people decide to do. Having low self confidence is bad, having a high sense of self confidence is great, though a double edged sword. Overconfidence becomes an ego, and that gets in people’s way. This base kind of confidence is particularly important on the personal level in relation to following commands.
Helping your players achieve self confidence is one of the extra roles of the commander. You must advocate and appeal to your player’s minds and assist in pushing them beyond their own expectations. When a player has low self confidence in their skills or equipment, it can drag them out of the sport. That’s not good, because we need teammates and targets. Your players need to be egged on and pushed to the limit in order to succeed.
How to do this? Simple. Use “please” and “thank-you” to begin with. I believe we’ve discussed this before, but when a team first starts out, the magic words go a long way to making the players more confident and willing because they are doing a favor for a friend. When you’ve moved beyond that point, it’s time to start thinking about how each player ticks. When you find something that gives a particular player a rush, like if a player likes the charge command, go for it. Make sure you call it for them once or twice an outing. When it goes right, they’ll be brimming with confidence, and if it doesn’t, well, they’ll be telling a good story on the ride back. Either way, appealing to this player has given them a value in their mind as part of a team. This helps bring them up and makes them stronger players.
This example also ties into Command confidence, or the confidence a player has in their commander’s actions and decisions in relation to the team. Making good choices and choices the players had a hand in raises this. Doing dumb things makes this falter. You aren’t a commander to abuse power, you’re a commander to improve the power you’ve taken control of. If you don’t think about what you’re doing, you’ll get a mad team and kicked out of your job. You have to, again, appeal to the players and help them see things your way, even if they don’t necessarily like it.
Start by not shoving things down their throat. Again, “please” and “thank you”s go a long way. You can bark orders later when they trust you. Any time that a major decision for the team comes up, talk with them about it and see how things are. They’ll thank you for it later when the choice is made.
Finally, team confidence. This is the trust between your teammates. It’s how willing they are to take a shot for each other. This is the brotherhood of war. This sounds a lot like chemistry, doesn’t it? Well, there’s a step between this and chemistry and confidence. Chemistry is the ability to think and react to the team, while confidence is the ability to trust and obey.
Sounds the same? Consider that a team with good chemistry can react quickly and effectively to each other, but they may not actually let the other members of the team make their moves if they don’t trust them to do so. That doesn’t work out too well, does it? By the same token, a confident team may allow each other to make moves, but if they aren’t good with each other, the moves may not even happen because they trust that they won’t have to do anything, that the other people have it covered when they really don’t.
How do you work with these different parts? Well, I’ll say it again, take it off the field. However, confidence doesn’t have to be gained in paintball alone. In fact, drilling can help, but it makes it seem like less of a game and more of a job. We don’t want that. We want our team to have a blast every time. That’s where service events come in handy.
Take your team, and find an organization. Have your team donate time and effort to that organization together. This breeds self confidence. Take this self confidence and build it into confidence in you, the commander. Then, take that, and have the team trust each other. When the team trusts, it succeeds.
Your team benefits from spending off-field time together. Take this time, and don’t focus it like they’re training to be a better team, but take it and make them better people. Paintballers are individualists by nature, it’s a curse of the sport. As the commander, you must take these individuals and temper them into a strong, unified force. When your players are better people, being an individual becomes more important, and playing to this is the key to granting your team confidence.