Army Crew Case Analysis

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Why does VT lose to the JVT?

Coach P.'s objective selection criteria for the Varsity team (VT) was based on the top eight people with the highest scores for individual strength; however, VT usually loses head-to-head races with the Junior Varsity team (JVT) 66% of the time.

The team was not unified, and VT members did not trust each other. As it was natural to expect the eight best individual performers to defeat JVT with a large margin, the fact that VT lost frequently to the latter caused the VT members to believe that certain members were not working hard, so much so that many thought that they were the only ones carrying the boat. The end result was that they no longer rowed as a team. Since a rowing team's performance depends on the synchrony of movement by all members, it is thus not surprising that VT lost many races to the JVT, which had better teamwork.

This distrust and personal conflict had a negative impact on team cohesion, as can be seen when the VT tends to blame others during self-critique sessions. VT members also avoided physical contact with each other during meetings. All these are symptoms of a team not working together in a competition in which teamwork is essential.

In addition, the VT did not have a team leader, and lacked communication between members. A team leader would have played an important role in motivating team members, reduce and resolve conflicts between members, and reinforce cohesion. Instead, the team contained many disrupter personalities, which was not conducive to team performance.

Recommendation to promote JVT to VT

It is abundantly proven through many races that individual strength, endurance and skill has little correlation with the win rate of the VT, beyond a baseline strength, endurance and skill requirement; rather, it is the team cohesion and synchrony that is positively correlated with team performance with VT and JVT. The JVT, with higher team cohesion, and almost non-existent levels of conflict, performed better than the VT.

Based on the hard and objective data on the win ratio, it is plainly clear that the JVT's performance is superior to VT's, even after taking into consideration individual performance. As the coach has insisted on utilizing objective observations to derive a conclusion on team performance, the larger number of wins by the JVT rightly suggests that it should have been the VT representative instead.

The JVT has better morale and team cohesion as compared to the VT members whom were blaming each other individual members for the team's poor performance. This also explains the common view by more experienced coaches whom tend to identify psychological variables as the key ingredients for a successful team.

On the contrary, VT's internal discord and lack understanding (and perhaps commitment) towards synchrony rowing necessitates that their performance is destined to be poorer than JVT.

As such, we recommend that Coach P. promote the JVT to VT, and demote the VT to the JVT.

Why not switch some of the members?

The results of controlled tests for swapping team members yielded inconclusive results. During initial placement, the VT members when placed individually tended to improve their boat's winning margin, and tended to cause their boats to win by a larger margin; however, later in the season, with VT losing most of the competitions, it appeared that VT members sent down to the JVT caused the VT to lose by an even larger margin instead, proving that the original placement of the VT members should have caused them to win instead, thereby creating a contradictory scenario.

As the hypothesis that individual members make a difference in the team's winning rate is in contradiction with itself, it must necessarily be dismissed as irrelevant.

Furthermore, with the cumulated wins and common shared experience of the team members, JVT members were severely resistant to being promoted to the continually losing VT. As such the transferred team member may be antagonistic and uncooperative. In a sport that requires perfect coordination, this would end up reducing the performance of the adopted team. It would also not have been possible for team members whom have been swapped out to create enough shared experiences to learn the norms and rules of interactions of their newly adopted teams, and row with the same consistency with the other team members. As such, overall