Basketball Servant Leadership Series: Building Community

NBC Basketball's Servant Leadership Series: Building Community
“One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals.” – Jean Vanier.

The final characteristic of servant leadership is the ability to build community with those you lead.

What is a community?
Community is defined by a common sense of trust, belonging, and mutual contribution to a mission and to one another. The health of each of these: trust, belonging, the mission will indicate the health of the community. What are your communities? Our lives intersect with many communities: school, basketball, work, neighborhood, church, etc… Since COVID the value of healthy communities has never been more important.

What does it mean to build?
"Build" in this context is a highly American word. Build, as a verb in many other cultures referred to structures and materials, not intangibles. Build, in this construct, is an investment in the imagination, construction, growth, and sustainment of a healthy community.

What is an unhealthy community?
Not all communities build community. As with all of life, lack of health is easier to analyze but difficult to fully recognize when you are living in it. An unhealthy community has limited trust. There is back-biting, gossip, bitterness, and frustration. There are alliances against one another.

In unhealthy communities, there are favored and those who are not. The unfavored are held to the highest levels of scrutiny and expectation while the favored are extended special graces. The unfavored are ignored or disregarded and the favored are cherished.

Unhealthy communities have a limited mission with limited internal desire to work together toward this mission.

This lack of trust, lack of belonging, and lack of mission destroy the greatest of communities: our schools, our offices, our teams, and our homes.

How to build a strong community.

Community fails too often because most people wait or rely on someone else to build the community—the coach, the captain, older members of the team, the wealthy families, or the families who have more time. If each member understands their own power and value in building community and commits to elevating the trust, the sense of belonging, and the mission, the value of the community grows exponentially.

Failed attempts at building community
Most people start by identifying what is not working and try to fix the community through frustration, complaint, or blame. The problem with trying to build a community by focusing on fixing the deficits is that the attention and energy go toward the negative, the painful, the divisive, and the broken.

What works.

Great communities always start with the dream—what do we all desire to dream together and accomplish. In the dream, there is hope, there is vision and there is the necessary energy needed to align the mission.

Next, take small steps. Too often we want a big end without the daily small steps that bring us there. As Jack Ricchiuto writes in his powerful article, “The Four Conversations that Build Community,” he states, “Over time, thousands of small acts in a community make the impossible possible every time.” Find small ways to make the community powerful: write a note of encouragement, clean up a yard, take a meal, listen to a conversation, play a fun game with someone.

Share your gifts. What can each of us do with our skills and talents to contribute to the sense of community? Our pooling of talents to serve and bless each other, bind us closer to one another.

Invite people to your community. Who can you encourage to bring into your different communities to bring a more united, diverse, and caring culture?

The Basketball Community
Basketball has the blessing of being beloved all around the world, however, it is such a large community there can be a disconnect and a feeling of being left out. Most of us have a basketball community connected with our school, AAU program, or small town. Basketball could be a huge part of your life or a tiny part. The community becomes powerful when each one of us decides to build a strong community together.

Ways to Build a Vibrant Basketball Community
The easiest way for many teams to try and build a basketball community is to build an exclusive community. A coach or AAU club tries to gather up the best players, give them great gear, keep them exclusive and have them dominate everyone in the surrounding area. Once they have this domination, then they travel everywhere to play more games. This is a poor basketball community. A vibrant basketball community has the mutual viability of building excellent players throughout so that you build people around the city who make you stronger, make the community stronger, and expand the talent to more for greater intensity, variety, and power.

Simple Steps to Build Basketball Community

• Strengthen the younger generation
• Host tournaments with meaningful events, not just games
• Become friends with competitors
• Don’t elevate a select few through money or power
• Coach or help build up those younger than you in the sport
• Be a basketball mentor
• Take pride in your team and program without verbally demeaning or degrading others
• Create cross-city scrimmages, practice exchanges, and other ways to build diversity
• Attend camps that bring in players from different areas
• Start a brotherhood or sisterhood prayer group, community service group, with players from different teams and programs.

Message to Coaches about Building Community
After COVID, hundreds are moving to small towns in Montana, Idaho, and Washington for a simpler life and a more connected community. There is something remarkable about watching fall high school football in the metal bleachers surrounded by a community who all know each other by their first name, a community who supports each other in hardship and celebration. As a coach, you get to be a leader who builds communities that matter.

Learn from ecology. There are three systems in ecology.

Competition Community
Competition in ecology benefits no species from the interaction. In competitive interactions, species evolve either to avoid each other, tolerate the presence of others, or to aggressively exclude the other.

What can you learn from this as a coach? No, we are not saying that competition in your program is bad. But do you have a competition culture that creates avoidance, merely tolerance, or aggressive exclusion? If so, you have created a culture of comparison and a survival climate that destroys true brotherhood and sisterhood.

Predation Communities
Basically, the strong prey upon the weak. In this culture, there is a hierarchy, exclusion, and a dog-eat-dog culture that leaves strong athletes and sacrifices those who either don’t choose to play by these tactics or can’t survive them.

Mutualism Communities
In mutualism communities, species thrive together and benefit from one another. Each makes the other healthier, stronger, and creates greater cooperation. Consider your team. Do your players make each other stronger, does everyone benefit from being part of your basketball community?

A Message to Parents about Community
Family can be the core of a beautiful community. At the heart of a true family is trust. Without trust, meaningful relationships are impossible. Trust is impossible in a climate of dishonesty. Truth and trust are always found hand in hand.

Loving family relationships indicated by sincerity, compassion, self-responsibility, and trust allow us to build a meaningful family community where people grow together. This safe and sacred community can talk about problems in ways that lead to greater unity and health.

Simple ways to build a loving family community
a. Ask forgiveness often for ways you intentionally and unintentionally hurt one another.
b. Laugh in kindness with one another
c. Eliminate constant sarcasm and hurtful teasing
d. Serve one another
e. Learn together – read a book, attend a class, take a trip
f. Mix it up—if someone always drives or sits in one spot or only does one activity, mix it up and try something new.
g. Write encouragement notes to your family members
h. Make mealtime meaningful with fun and engaging conversations.