It is essential for a team to have a leader (s) when playing either on the floor, court, or field. The coaches are bestowed the task of choosing the leaders. Some coaches can decide to use two to three captains while others may have different leaders depending on the occasion. Furthermore, others prefer having a “committee” of student leaders to help accomplish their goals. Since leadership plays a critical role in achieving good results, choosing a leader requires a thorough analysis of the available options. Although it looks like a simple task, often that may not be the case. Guiding a student-athlete throughout their tremendous transformation to become a team leader is an entailing task that involves series trials and errors (Dobbs & The Academy for Sport Leadership, 2015). Therefore, this paper elucidates the model a coach can use to promote student-athlete leadership, characteristics, and traits to use in identifying potential team leaders, as well as the emotional intelligence of a team leader.
Student-athlete leadership training
The use of ‘student-athlete leadership training’ is crucial in promoting student-athlete leadership. The program aims at developing leadership skills such as emotional intelligence, resilience, and ownership which are vital to student-athlete leaders. Additionally, the model also teaches student-athlete leaders’ virtues such as perseverance, sportsmanship, self-discipline, and the importance of teamwork (Forsythe, 2013).
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Identifying potential team leaders
Fellow athletes respect and appreciate team leaders with great skills and abilities as well as leadership qualities. Therefore, it is crucial that potential team leaders should exercise the qualities that their team members expect from them such as a high degree of self-control, discipline, high morale, persistence, and confidence. Additionally, the leaders should be able to maintain a realistic strategy for success, effective communication, as well as possess the charisma to rally team support through positive guidance and encouragement rather than dominance (North, 2017).
Emotional intelligence
An emotional intelligent athlete is an individual with the capability of understanding and managing his or her own emotions and those of fellow team members (Mindtools, 2018) . The athlete knows his or her personal or team feelings and how these emotions can affect other persons. As a team leader, being emotionally intelligent is of necessary for success (Mindtools, 2018) . A leader who stays in control and calmly assesses a situation is bound to succeed than a leader who remains skeptical and shouts at his team when under stress.
References
Dobbs, C., & The Academy for Sport Leadership. (2015). Developing Leadership Capacity -. Retrieved from https://coachingtoolbox.net/blueprint/developing-leadership-capacity.html
Forsythe, B. (2013). Time to refocus on the whole student. Retrieved from http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/time-refocus-whole-student
North, C. (2017). Description of a Good Sports Leader. Retrieved from https://www.livestrong.com/article/548835-description-of-a-good-sports-leader/
Mindtools. (2018). Emotional Intelligence in Leadership Learning How to Be More Aware. Retrieved from https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_45.htm
