A Shared Recipe For Success: NorthWood Athletics Enjoy Banner Year
NAPPANEE — While sports writers, fans and the general public tend to gauge a team’s success by metrics like rankings, records and championships, at NorthWood, a program’s success isn’t measured in wins and losses.
If it were, the so-called “Friday night sports” — football, boys basketball and baseball — would stack up pretty well in 2016-17. In fact, NorthWood Athletic Director Norm Sellers can’t remember a time in his 11-year tenure that the Panthers have done so well across those three sports in a given school year: The Black Crunch finished 14-1 on the way to a 3A football semistate title last fall, Panther basketball held the state’s No. 1 ranking in its class for a time en route to a 21-3 finish over the winter, and the baseball team recently wrapped a 26-2 campaign that included a 26-game win streak and the program’s first regional title in more than 30 years.
But while those accolades may be very impressive, they’re not the focus, says Sellers.
“We are truly basing our athletic department in the principles of being education-based athletics for all of our student-athletes. By doing this we don’t discuss wins versus losses, we base it on the overall experience we give our athletes and their families,” explained Sellers. “I am really working hard at helping our coaches to not evaluate their programs by the standard of winning and losing but including the entire big picture of what makes them successful.”
And it may be that very approach that makes those win-loss columns tilt so lopsidedly in favor of the Ws at NorthWood.
Coaches are more concerned with providing a quality experience for their athletes, as well as building chemistry among teammates. It’s not that wins and losses are ignored, it’s just that they tend to take care of themselves when they are not themselves the end goal.
“I feel that the recognition that the players have earned is always good, and, obviously, it’s something that they can look back on and be proud of their accomplishments,” said basketball coach Aaron Wolfe. “Yet I would agree with Norm Sellers that it is a small part of the focus — representing your community in a first-class manner and understanding that the journey is better than the end.”
“The aspect I respect most of my coaching staff is that they are consistent,” said Sellers. “The wins and losses will work themselves out, but our coaches go about their craft in a way that enables kids to create passion and develop relationships. To me the most important aspect of the experience we try to provide for our athletes is the ability to develop relationships between coaches and teammates striving for a common goal.”
Perhaps because it seems so obvious, teamwork is an often-overlooked component to success on the field or the floor.
Some groups just gel more quickly or more deeply than others to become better than the sum of their parts. Chemistry takes a combination of ingredients, but coaches can certainly try to cultivate the kinds of climates that are more conducive to team-building. That’s something NorthWood’s Friday night coaches seem to have mastered in 2016-17.
“Coaches will tell you all the time, if they have a great season, normally they never come back and say ‘Well, we just had the most talented group we’ve ever had,’” said football coach Nate Andrews. “Normally they say ‘Well this group got along well. They played for one another. There were not any egos.’ That’s what we try to foster, and we try to do that through different camps and clinics and various meetings and organizational things where we work on those team-building skills.”
If the combined successes of NorthWood’s Friday night sports in 2016-17 is any indication, they seem to have accomplished just that.
But camaraderie isn’t something that can be forced, either, and much of the credit belongs to the athletes.
“The biggest thing at the end of the day — and I complimented them on this — the wins are great, the championships are great, but watching a team come together, those guys are close,” said baseball coach Jay Sheets at the close of his team’s season. “And that’s the coolest thing as a coach because I’ve seen other teams where guys aren’t close like that, and it can be a nightmare to coach them. They made my job easy.”
Players certainly deserve the praise, and coaches and the NorthWood athletic administration can take their fair share of credit, too, says basketball coach Aaron Wolfe. But much of the school’s culture of hard work and team-first attitude start at home, says the 11th year head coach.
“We have tremendous parents with regards to support, and we also have a community that not only supports our school system, but there’s also a fabric of hard work in our community that contributes to their children before they even walk through the doors of the school,” he said.
“The camaraderie and the teamwork is also a sign of good parenting. Students and athletes both understand and value the importance of being part of a team.”
Of course, teams rarely record winning seasons without some talent, and NorthWood certainly had plenty of that in 2016-17, too.
Natural athletic ability can be a relatively rare quality, which is part of the reason success at the high school level is often so cyclical: Student-athletes are only available for a maximum of four years, and it’s not always easy to find similarly-gifted individuals in the next, incoming class. Even among those with innate ability, talent can take time to develop.
It’s also why you often see the same names across multiple sports rosters in a given school year.
But one of the reasons what NorthWood did over three seasons this past year was so remarkable was the fact that there were so few crossover athletes from baseball to basketball to football. In fact, no one played all three at the varsity level.
There were some familiar faces in two of the three sports — Trey Bilinski and DeAndre Smart made key contributions in both football and basketball, and Drew Minnich was a big part of his teams’ successes in both football and baseball, to name just a few — and the contributions of those crossover athletes can’t be overlooked, said football coach Nate Andrews. But there were friendships even among individuals from different teams and broader support throughout NorthWood athletics, he said. And with that, the success of a given team helped spill over into another.
“You go to a game, and you see all these guys being there and supporting each other and I think there’s carryover that way, and I think it also becomes contagious,” said Andrews. “For instance, the football team sees the basketball team being successful and think to themselves ‘Well, we can do that.’ And then the baseball team sees the football team being successful and thinks ‘Those are our buddies, and we can do that as well.’”
NorthWood is hoping its many successes can carry over into next year, too. But with 2016-17 now fully in the rearview, Panther athletics aren’t looking backward, says athletic director Norm Sellers. They’re taking the same approach they always do into next year.
And the wins and losses should take care of themselves.
“Make no mistake about it, we have great coaches that do amazing work, and they do it with talented, committed athletes but all of that changes from year to year,” Sellers said.
“I am very proud of what we do here at NorthWood, and this year was something I will never forget. But we go into the 2017-18 school year just as we have gone into every school year — eagerly anticipating the start of a new year, working to be the best we can be.”