Fishers High School

HOW TO BUILD A WINNING TEAM Herb Brooks was the architect of what might be the greatest upset in the history of team sports. At the 1980 Winter Olympics, Coach Brooks and his team of mostly unknown amateur hockey players defeated the seemingly invincible Soviet national team, made up of professional stars who were unbeaten in their previous three Olympics and expected to dominate their way to a fourth. Almost no one - outside of Herb Brooks and the young men on his team - believed they could win. Their victory was appropriately coined the “Miracle on Ice.” The summer before that miracle, Brooks was responsible for constructing his Olympic roster. In July of 1979, 68 of the top college players in America were invited to Colorado Springs for the team tryout. As assistant coaches and support staff prepared to offer their initial observations, they were surprised - and probably a little offended - to find out that only a few minutes into the tryout, Brooks had already finalized his list. It was not the roster anyone else had envisioned. In fact, many of the highest profile players were left off. “You’re missing some of the best players,” his assistant coach protested. Brooks looked back at him without missing a beat. “I’m not looking for the best players,” he famously replied. “I’m looking for the right ones.” That response reveals that Herb Brooks knew something about how to build a winning team - something many of the rest of us miss. He knew that winning teams are more than just a collection of talent. There’s plenty of evidence to prove that point. Just look around. There are talented collections of people all over the place - in sports and at school, at work and at home - who never come close to reaching their potential. Herb Brooks believed he could build a team that could beat the Soviets, but he knew it would require more than talent alone. Winning would require a level of toughness and commitment that not every hockey player possesses, and he was willing to sacrifice a little bit of talent for an abundance of heart. If you’re here today as someone who’s responsible for building a team, there’s an important lesson in the approach Herb Brooks chose to adopt. That lesson isn’t that talent doesn’t matter. Talent does matter - on your team, like it does on any team - and arguing otherwise is silly. But Herb Brooks knew that talent alone isn’t enough. That’s the lesson. A team that's really going to win needs toughness and commitment and heart, too. For any team builder, talent can be alluring. But without toughness and commitment and heart, even the most talented group of individuals will struggle to do the really difficult things authentic success requires them to do. It’s worth considering - in the context of your team building project - whether you’ve given those winning qualities the attention and the authority they deserve. More importantly, there’s a lesson for anyone who's here today as a member of a team yourself - in sports or at school, at work or at home. Your talent matters, of course, but the “Miracle on Ice” proves that if you really want to win, more than just your talent is required. In 1980, the Soviet hockey team was superior to the Americans in every measurable area. They were bigger, faster, and stronger. They were more skilled and more experienced. But Herb Brooks hand-picked that group of kids to be part of his team because he knew they had something inside that couldn’t be measured. Their toughness and their commitment and their heart separated them from every other team on the planet, including the mighty Soviets. They might not have been the best players in the world, but when it came to winning? They were the right ones. So the challenge for each of us here today is to keep building those intangible but important winning qualities, and to make sure that regardless of whether we’re one of the best ones, our behavior validates that we’re one of the right ones. Is talent important? Of course it is. It’d be silly to argue otherwise. But if you’re serious about building a team that wins, it’s important to see that talent isn’t all that matters. Toughness and commitment and heart matter, too. Herb Brooks and the 1980 Olympic hockey team prove that when you put the right kind of people together, anything is possible.