Anytime you can have players only meetings in September it’s special
I'll never forget in little league (majors) We had the best team by far. But we were fucking around and lost a couple games. We were having a sloppy practice. The coach (one of my dads) told us to go down the field and have a players meeting and decide if we wanted to be champions or not. If not we could just go home and have some ice cream and watch TV. Of course we decided we WANTED to be champs. Came back and won the whole fucking thing!
Bottom line, players only meetings WORK.
Same thing happened on my babe ruth team, except we decided to bag it and go directly to the end of season pizza party at one of those papa's pizzas with the huge tube jungle playground thing.
My Babe Ruth team was playing in our district all star tournament in Hermiston when i was 14. We were expected to win.
There was an arcade thing there with two full indoor water slides (we called them hydro tubes). Our coaches had banished us from going there under the the threat of benching or even removal due to kids being beat up, even cut, and generally worn out from it.
We dropped into the losers bracket on kind of an upset, and the coaches suggested we have a players only meeting that night. Our host parents got together and decided to have it at the waterside place. All but a couple of kids showed up. We didn't have a meeting at all, but one kid got a huge gash in the slide and had to get stitches.
They couldn't bench us all. We won another game to get into the finals then got ten runned by the Champs in the first game of the finals.
CSB