The Elon women’s basketball team got a chance to train with the Marines and practice mental strength and collaboration
Elon’s women’s basketball team is no stranger to hard work. After all, they train five days a week during the preseason. But on an early Saturday morning this fall they headed to Elon’s Robertson Track and Field Complex for an unfamiliar exercise—a workout with two members of the U.S. Marines that would not only test their physical abilities, but their mental strength as well.
The workout started with an 800-meter run and got more difficult from there as the team took part in drills typical of Marine training. This included push presses with boxes filled with fake ammunition, different types of crawls and a relay in which they carried their teammates and threw fake grenades. Women’s basketball head coach Charlotte Smith got the idea for this training after she saw the Marines give a presentation at the NCAA Final Four tournament. She gave Stephen Fishler, director of women’s basketball operations, the task of bringing the Marines to Elon to conduct a workout for the team.
The focus of the training was building mental resilience, a component of playing any sport. “We always talk about how basketball is 90 percent mental and there are times in the game where you’ll feel like you’re hitting a wall physically,” Smith says. “You have to find a way to push through, and in order to push through sometimes you have to think outside of yourself and what you’re experiencing and what you’re feeling physically.”
Another aspect of the workout was finding ways for the team to support one another. A concept the team used last season to help with teamwork was the “V” pattern that geese create when they fly in a group. “When you’re seeing the geese in the V formation, the lead goose, when it tires out, it goes to the back and somebody else rotates to the front and then when the geese are honking, scientists say that they are actually encouraging each other,” Smith says. “So when things got tough, you could see the ‘honking of the geese,’ so to speak, ramping up and them encouraging each other when things got challenging.”
The facet of teamwork was especially prevalent during the relay race as the players had to rely on and trust each other. They had to carry and drag a partner, pretending they were a wounded soldier. “What you do is a lot more than just for you; it has to do with your whole team,” guard Lexi Mercer ’20 says, adding the exercise allowed her to focus on her partner as much as herself.
Smith believes leaders should embody the characteristics they want in their team, so the coaches also participated in the training. “I wouldn’t ask anything of you that I’m not willing to do myself,” she says. For the players, having their coaches involved in the workout was impactful. “Seeing our coaches lead by example encouraged us to want to do it more,” says guard Jada Graves ’20. “We bonded more and learned about positivity, picking each other up when times are kind of down. It just made us communicate better as well.”
The players want to take what they learned about mental strength and looking out for each other from the workout into their season. And although they probably will not regularly train like the Marines, it was a beneficial learning experience for them. “I think even though it was challenging, we were having a lot of fun doing it and I think that was really important to bring us into our preseason, like working really hard but having fun at the same time,” Mercer says.