Mottoes give teams motivation

Team mottoes.

You see them screen-printed on the back of players’ warmup shirts, or hear them chanted from the heart of a pregame huddle.

To those beyond the field of play or outside that huddle, such mottoes often come across as cliched and unnecessary, cute little adages that more often than not suggest the ideal world rather than the reality of the given situation.

But in the best of occasions, that’s only because we have no idea of the full message within the motto, a lesson being reinforced by player and coach all season.

The Boston Celtics won an NBA championship this week, thanks in large part to shrewd player personnel moves during the offseason that brought Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, James Posey and others to Boston to join Paul Pierce as an assemblage of veteran talent no one else in the league could match.

But assembling such talent alone doesn’t always work. The Houston Rockets acquired Charles Barkley before the start of the 1996-97 season to join Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler. Yet the Rockets, who won NBA championships in 1994 and 1995, weren’t able to replicate that success.

The Los Angeles Lakers, having already won three straight NBA titles in 2000, 2001 and 2002 with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, added legends Karl Malone and Gary Payton to that mix in an attempt to regain that championship feeling in 2004.

But, alas, just as in 2008, those Lakers were unable to win the gold, either.

This year’s Celtics admittedly were a bit more desperate in their off-season dealings, having won just 24 games a year ago and losing out on the No. 1 draft pick they so richly deserved based on the level of their futility.

But merely acquiring talent wasn’t enough to assure Banner 17, so Celtics coach Doc Rivers introduced the African word “ubuntu” to the team as its motto for the season.

“Ubuntu” roughly means, “I am, because we are” in English, and in this specific case translated into the need for the all-stars and the rest of the Celtics to understand that individual accolades would come only through collective sacrifice – the essence of teamwork.

Watching the duckboats parade through downtown Boston on Thursday suggests the message got through.

Likewise, the Brewer High School baseball team seeks its first Class A state championship Saturday.

The Witches, having secured their first Eastern Maine title since 1988 earlier this week, face a daunting challenge against Deering of Portland, the undefeated defending state champion.

Yet coach David Morris’ team already has accomplished a great deal this season, in part because of the message in its motto, “confidence in yourself, faith in each other.”

Brewer has competed in the upper echelon of the Eastern A baseball world for many years – with three trips to the regional final in the last five seasons.

But this year they’ve finally broken through, a testament to the considerable talent on the team, but also the belief that the team chemistry derived from self-assuredness and trust leads to making the right decisions and the big plays on the field.

So far, so good for the Witches. And, based on their 17-2 record this spring, there’s no reason to believe they won’t tackle this final challenge with confidence in themselves and faith in each other.

Just like their motto says.

eclark@bangordailynews.net

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