Two Types of Players

Personality makes all the difference in the outcome.

After five years of enduring soaking wet shoes and numb cold fingers, I recently stopped being a football coach. Even though our calendar says we’ve got four seasons, I’ve concluded we’ve only got two. Bloody hot and sweaty for two months a year, and for the other ten, it’s wet, windy, and darn cold.

I had been a Taekwondo trainer for three decades, and martial arts has taught me a great deal about people as individuals, about myself, and about life in general. But, football has highlighted team dynamics and what personality does for a team.

Throughout these five years, I’ve had the bad luck to be coaching teams that were the sole teams in their age category at the club. So, in short, there was no team I could delegate rotten apples or bad players to. Thus, I always had a very mixed team, of pretty good and really bad players. But these are not the two types of players I want to discuss.

The Two Types of Players

There are two different types of players that I recognized on the football field:

A Type One Player is the most common: a player that complains about the outside world, especially when things go bad. It’s the referee, their teammates, the coach, the grass, the posts, the…