|
Choosing a Team Name
Some leagues may already assign your team a name (I see that more often in youth baseball leagues), or perhaps you're coaching a school team that already has a mascot. But if you're like many coaches, you may have just been assigned a team color, and more likely than not your players will want to have a name.
So how do you go about choosing a name? There are a variety of ways to do so, but the point to keep in mind is to try and prevent a big conflict. If you're not careful, you'll have half of your team mad at the other half because their favorite name wasn't chosen.
To combat this, here are a few different suggestions:
-
Choose the name yourself - you might consider choosing the team name on your own, and then just announcing the team name to everyone at your first practice. Especially if your team name matches your team color (Red Devils, Yellow Jackets, etc.), this is sometimes easy to get away with (especially for younger teams).
-
Combine your suggestions - we had a team one year, and after asking the kids what names they liked, half the team liked the "Bulls" and half the team like the "Sharks". So what did we call ourselves? You guessed it, the BullSharks. Everyone was happy.
-
Use a "Silent Vote" - for most teams this one makes the most sense. The idea is to let the team pick their name by majority, without having anyone's feelings hurt (or as little as possible). First, ask your kids what names they like. Pick the three that appear to be either the most popular or the most logical. Then, have all the kids put their heads down and close their eyes. Tell them you will announce the names one at a time, and when you call out the name they like best, they should raise their hands. They can only vote once and should keep their heads down the entire time. After the votes are counted, whichever team name gets the most votes wins (if it's a tie pick the one you like best). By this "silent vote", the players don't know who voted for what, so even if their favorite name didn't get picked, they won't know who to be mad at.
No matter what you try, inevitably you'll have at least one player that isn't happy with the choice. In any case they'll get over it soon enough.
|
|
