At Eltham we are a Child Safe club, with our Commitment to Child Safety stating “All children who are a part of our Club have a right to feel safe and to be safe. The wellbeing of the children in our Club will always be our first priority and our Club has a zero tolerance to child abuse. Our Club aims to create a child safe and child friendly environment where children feel safe and have fun and our Club’s activities are always carried out in the best interests of the children.”
Our Club’s vision statement is explicit in our goal of embedding excellence, fair play and pride within the Eltham Wildcats Basketball Club. In working towards this vision, we ask every domestic team at Eltham Wildcats work towards developing their own team values based around this club vision. We want to empower children and young people to be safe, to develop and to be connected to our Club
This document aims to help coaches to set the expectations and values for the players, coaches and families within their teams. These agreed upon team values will guide the culture of each team and highlight the way all Eltham teams will conduct themselves – with excellence, fair play and pride.
Team values
First, discuss with your team what values they see as important when playing sport and working as a team. Values can be seen as behaviours that are important or useful for a team to demonstrate. You are looking to agree upon 2-3 values with your team. For some teams you may need to scaffold this discussion – some questions to support this could be:
– what behaviours are important to see at training and/or in games?
– what is important to you as a player?
– how do you want your coach, team mates and parents to behave during games?
Suggested values include sportsmanship, inclusion, courage, creativity, curiosity, fairness, respect, honesty, kindness, leadership, perseverance, resilience, self-regulation and team work.
Next, talk about what these values look like – what are the actions that you will be able to see when the team is demonstrating these values. Make sure you include the actions the coaches and parents do, as well as what actions you want to see from the players.
An example may look like this:
Finally, consider how you will be accountable for these values. It is important to live the values and reflect on them regularly. Write them down and share them with the team. Refer to them in pre-game and post-game team chats. Importantly, these can be referred when holding the people in the team accountable for their behaviour.
We would love you to share your team values with the Club – you can email these to welfare@elthamwildcats.net.au – don’t forget to include you team number and coach name.