Getting an A in Chemistry : Some Coaches Bring In Business Consultants to Help Teams Bond

Tinker Toys were piled atop three card tables in center field. The Foothill High softball players were given simple instructions: Build the tallest tower possible.

“They sensed the challenge and the competition, and those three teams started competing against each other,” said Foster Mobley, a management consultant working with the team. “At one point, one person went to the other group and implied that if they worked together, they could build a really big tower, and that person was laughed at.

“At the end of it, one tower fell down, one stood very tall and one was mediocre.”

Afterward, the players huddled around Mobley, who asked: “Who won?”

“The middle group said they won,” Mobley recalled. “The mediocre group said, ‘We almost won’ and started making excuses, and the lame team started laughing at how lame they were.”

So everyone had a good laugh, until Mobley asked the next question.

“You’re all Foothill Knights. Who won?”

At which point the laughter stopped.

“It dawned on them,” Mobley said, “that had they worked together and not competitively, they would have achieved performance much beyond what any of them had imagined.”

That’s the point of Foothill softball Coach Joe Gonzalez’s season-long experiment, which might more accurately be called Team Chemistry 101. It’s not the first time a team has gone to this extreme. And it’s certainly not the only way to unify a team.

Chemistry can be developed by something as simple as a team dinner or outing, or something more complex, like a team rallying around an injury. Sometimes, even an argument between a coach and player can do wonders.

“Chemistry is kind of a nebulous thing to put your finger on,” said Fountain Valley baseball Coach Ron LaRuffa. “Sometimes I think it’s overrated, and other times you can’t negate the importance of it. Anything you can do, you should try to do.”

Which is Gonzalez’s point.

Dave Ochoa, Villa Park baseball coach from 1970 to 1991, and again this season, has used goal-setting, positive affirmations, self-visualization and lots of charts in building chemistry. He had players list who wouldn’t pick up the trash, who they wanted to hit in the clutch, who they trusted, who they didn’t. . . .

“Guys started getting ideas about how their teammates felt about them,” Ochoa said.

He said it was one of the big reasons Villa Park won 25 games in a row in 1981, but that kids on this year’s team haven’t really bought into it.

Chemistry can be developed by something as simple as a team dinner or outing, or something more complex, like a team rallying around an injury or some flash point event.

Gonzalez took the unusual path of bringing in a management consultant to perform very structured exercises that fostered some enlightened discussion. Out of that discussion comes growth. At least, that’s what the players say.

“It makes it easier to be out there every day and put your heart into it because you know everyone else is pointed in the same direction,” said Foothill sophomore Jaime Clark. “You put everything on the table. I can’t say enough good things about it.”

Gonzalez had been part of a team-building exercise after becoming president of an extension-cord manufacturer. The company responded with three years of record sales and profits.

Hoping to recapture the chemistry of his 1992 Southern Section championship team and ensure that the five freshmen on the varsity didn’t feel alienated, Gonzalez said, “Why leave team chemistry to chance?”

He brought in Mobley, a Tustin consultant who more typically spends his time improving performance among corporate managers for $2,500 per day. Working for free, this is his first extensive involvement with an athletic team.

Though most high school coaches rave about team chemistry, few have gone to this length to foster it. Sometimes, it just happens.

Dave Demarest, La Quinta’s baseball coach who won two section titles in three years, doesn’t do anything so structured, but he does have each player make out a lineup card before the season and then rank those cards in order, along with ranking the players.

“Involving them in decisions and making them feel this is their team really helps,” Demarest said. “Winning covers over a lot of problems. If you have an unhappy player and you’re winning, what are they going to say? But if you’re losing. . . .”

“[Foothill’s experiment] seems kind of extreme to me. . . . If they feel these things are helping them, more power to them.”

These consultants have had their share of success, though. Remember positive-thinking guru Tony Robbins’ association with the Stanley Cup-finalist Kings and Coach Barry Melrose? Arizona, ranked No. 1 in the NCAA softball poll, has three or four team-building projects a season with a campus employee who is there solely to meet with teams. Cal State Fullerton professor Ken Ravizza has worked with the Angels and other professional teams.

“I think the mental state is very important, especially at our level, because everyone is good,” said Mike Candrea, the Arizona coach whose team has won four of the last six NCAA titles. “The teams that can stay together through the good times and the bad times are the teams that are most successful. I think that breeds consistency, and that’s the only thing we can expect of our kids, to be consistent.”

Kari Tubbs, softball and girls’ volleyball coach at Aliso Niguel, said many high school coaches try to create chemistry, but it’s not done in such a structured manner as Foothill is attempting. She was subjected to such an attempt while playing softball at Rutgers.

“A lady came in and made us do visualization,” Tubbs said. “We all thought it was kind of bizarre. We didn’t buy it, but I think that had more to do with the individual who was supposedly trying to help us. Our chemistry on the team was fine.”

The chemistry is also fine at Woodbridge, where the Warriors’ softball team gets along well and plays that way, too. Coach Alan Dugard said a trip to Bullhead City, Ariz., for a tournament, which Woodbridge won, was critical to its success, which includes a 22-game winning streak. The team came together on that trip, he said.

“I didn’t realize it would be as good as it was for the individuals,” Dugard said. “The younger girls got to know the older girls better. The result was the team was so close so early in the season.

“Had we lost three or four games, it probably wouldn’t be the same. I don’t think every team would benefit from a trip like we did, but the fact is that we played well, got along well, there were no cliques, and we got that big win over Mater Dei that gave us a great deal of confidence and a sense of being together that carried over all year.”

Woodbridge senior Lizzy Lemire said the chemistry on the 1995 championship team far exceeded the 1996 team that lost in the final, though there were many of the same players.

“Last year, I think we tried too much to relive the season before,” she said. “Last year we got along really well, but it didn’t seem natural. How we acted, what we did, we were trying too hard to be the team we weren’t.”

Los Alamitos’ softball team has a pasta party every Wednesday, then watches “Beverly Hills 90210” together on television.

Foothill, too, shared a meal as one of its team-building exercises. Half the team was blindfolded and relied on a teammate to feed them.

“One of things [Gonzalez] has done is he has thought through exactly what he wants,” said Jone Pearce, a professor at UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management. “Whether he does it through a blind spaghetti feed or not, the most important thing is that he’s thought it through and he wants to fight cliques. That’s 90% of the solution.

“Whether he tries that path or another approach probably isn’t that important as long as he keeps checking to see if the approach is working.”

Pearce said that even in the corporate world, top-level managers often don’t think through what they really want to get out of it. She also said there are flaws in trying to promote a unified thinking and feel-good attitude among competitive people.

“There’s a reality factor,” she said. “As much as everyone talks about team play, if the bottom line is that the rewards are very clear for the star player or salesman, there’s a limit to how much you can counteract these powerful incentives in team-building. In corporations, that’s usually where these programs fail--they want to pretend these [star rewards] don’t exist.

“If they’re counteracting clear incentives for the individual . . . people are not going to act against their own best interests, and high school kids--or their parents--can figure that out.”

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One high-profile softball team, Pacifica--ranked No. 1 in the nation--had a mini-drama play out before a game against Foothill this season. Senior Toni Mascarenas, one of the best players in the county, got in an emotional confrontation with Coach Rob Weil.

“Toni had a legitimate [gripe],” Weil said. “She wasn’t pitching in the tournament and wanted to know why. Maybe it wasn’t the right time, or the right approach, and maybe she let her emotions take over, but we took care of it. It made us, it made her, it made our team much better.

“That night was the best thing that could have happened to us. The next day, we had a team meeting. I said that if we’re going to be successful and meet our goals, we need to be together as a group, not a bunch of individuals. I call the shots. If we’re successful, fine. If we’re not successful, that’s my problem. But we’ve been on the same page since that night.”

Mobley said Pacifica’s coming together after an emotional incident like that isn’t surprising. In fact, it’s often the norm.

“The greatest bonding agent for a successful team is that notion of crisis or challenge, and then performing together,” Mobley said. “Unless you’ve got a coach who’s really on the ball and can help 15 team members put things in the same perspective, then each of those 15 people are free to draw their own conclusions, and I guarantee they will draw them 15 different ways.”

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Jeff Janssen, mental training consultant for the University of Arizona, is one of a handful of such people across the nation who are employed by college athletic departments.

Arizona’s softball program, with four titles in six years, has been the most active program on campus in using Janssen’s services the past five years.

Michelle Churnock can attest to the power of Janssen’s involvement with the Arizona softball program. Now a sophomore, Churnock was a three-time Times All-County first-team player at Foothill High. She was Arizona’s starting shortstop as a freshman but was replaced by a designated hitter--despite batting .309--and has been platooned this season at second base. Her new role has taken some getting used to.

She came to realize there are some things she can’t control, and she shouldn’t let the things she can’t control dictate her emotions.

“Sometimes you go out and take ground balls for what seems like forever, and you wonder, ‘Am I doing this for nothing, does anyone notice how hard I’m working?’ ” Churnock said. “And it’s nice to hear someone say [in one of the team-building exercises], ‘You know Michelle, I admire your work ethic.’ It feels good to hear that because a lot of the time, no one’s going to come up and offer a free pat on the back.”

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Though it’s difficult to measure its on-field success because of Foothill’s past triumphs--along with Pacifica and Mater Dei, the Knights have won more softball games the last four years than any county school--Gonzalez is sold on his experiment. Practices have been easier and everyone--even the freshmen--has the same “ownership” in the team.

Gonzalez found Mobley, who had tinkered with some of these exercises on his daughter’s 12- and 14-and-under teams.

“All we’re trying to do is accelerate the process by which people come together and bond very deeply,” said Mobley, who meets with the team every few weeks. “The exercises get to them on a real visceral level. They don’t even know they’re learning. It generates an incredibly deeper discussion than if we dealt with it on an intellectual level.”

The Tinker Toy exercise led to defining team goals and its collective personality, which players decided was “relentless.”

Players falling backward off a ladder into the arms of teammates built trust. Having a sighted teammate feed a blindfolded one taught the blind about dependence, the sighted about not taking advantage of someone who’s vulnerable.

When each player created a personal logo, she was asked to tell her teammates what it meant. The result was an emotional session in which players learned what teammates valued in their lives and in each other.

“I talked about the way I am, and maybe it helps people understand me more,” said Lauren Bauer, a two-time Times All-County senior outfielder who teammates discovered needs a minute to herself on those occasions she fails instead of the rote ‘Get ‘em next time.’ “It adds for so much more tolerance on the team because you know people’s tendencies.”

Typical goal-setting for most teams include “win a league title, win a section title, win a state title.” But the Knights have gone beyond that. Not only are they setting goals, but they’re setting standards, “the behaviors or agreements we’re going to use to reach our goal,” Mobley said. “They ultimately carry you through the tough times.”

Bauer said drawing on those standards was directly responsible for a couple of key performances, including a 3-2 victory over Canyon in a nine-inning Century League game.

“I really think the team-building has contributed to that,” Bauer said. “This year more than other years, we’ve stayed in those tough games and battled through. We have a good sense of where we want to go and we’re not going to give up.”

Clark, the sophomore shortstop, said she felt at times intimidated and alienated as a freshman--despite setting a school record for runs batted in and making the all-county team.

“The exercises and discussion laid out what we want to accomplish, set everyone in the same direction as to our final destination, and it has made it easier to deal with team issues,” Clark said. “It’s easier to recognize what’s going on internally. If there’s any conflict, it’s immediately recognizable.”

Most county coaches predicted Foothill would struggle to retain its past stature in the county rankings, and one even projected the Knights to finish second in the Century League. Although Foothill (23-2-1) has scraped by at times, it is ranked second in the county and ninth in the nation. No matter what happens to the Knights in the playoffs--all the chemistry in the world might not mean a thing if they can’t touch the opposing pitcher--Gonzalez will sleep well at night.

“We’re having a better season than a lot of people expected us to have,” he said, “including me.”