Team captains and leaders of sports teams have many responsibilities that they have to shoulder. Many times the team looks up to these leaders and captains, they’re the ones that teammates rely on. Here’s some of the responsibilities that these basketball, dance, and wrestling captains or leaders have to shoulder in order to lead their teams to success.

Keeping the team in check. This means the captains and leaders need to make sure their teammates and players are doing their part to help the team win. During interviews with captains of different teams a common thing was that they have to “make sure you and your teammates are doing the right things”, wrestling captain Sammy Mendez shared. This includes making sure that people are listening to the coach, or in sports like wrestling they have to make sure their teammate’s weights aren’t over the limit, acting as middlemen for the coaches.

More often than not, captains have to act in lockstep with their coach and team to help navigate their programs to success. Dance team captains said that many times they have to come up with parts of the choreography and they have to help their teammates and coaches brainstorm solutions and ideas for problems.

Keeping people’s head’s up. Athletes will always experience a loss, whether it’s close or not the team should always “learn from the loss without staying on it too long” agreed the captains. Whether it’s a basketball game that comes down to the last possession, a dance competition where the team comes in second, or a wrestling match where a player barely loses, leaders have to make sure their teammates learn from the loss and learn from it.

What else do they do? They’re reliable, leaders need to make sure to show the team that can help during practices and games. This could include things like making sure they perform well in their games
or leading warmups during practices.

Another important thing leaders need to do is to be respectful to everyone. Leaders have to make sure they treat their teammates and coaches with respect. in order to maintain team chemistry and cooperation. Dance captain, Emma Matoka, expresses that captains need to, “think first with respect and just know that everyone is there to do the same thing.”

Team captains have a variety of responsibilities that help their team. There’s a lot of simple tasks like making sure their teammates aren’t down after a loss to complex tasks like coming up with choreography for their next dance. Athletes already have a lot of responsibilities that they have in order to win, team captains have to add the welfare of the entire team onto their own load of being the best athlete they can be. Team captains have more work and responsibilities that lets them lead their teams to success.