You know why you selected the captains, and inevitably you based your choices around their ability to lead and influence others. You have no doubt spent time this season choosing your captains and training their leadership skills. Leadership relies on its followers to push it. How well the followers follow is probably just as important to the performance outcome as how well the leaders lead. The irony is that great leaders on their journey to the helm have demonstrated an ability to follow and function effectively in a group. It is rarely viewed admirably and followers are often seen as being incapable of making independent decisions and consistently being led astray, perhaps like sheep. RELATED CONTENT: What role should parents play in your football program?įollowership is a globally underrated quality. Followership is a straightforward concept. It is the ability to take direction well, to get in line behind a program, to be part of a team and to deliver on what is expected of you. The link between effective leadership and performance is widely understood and accepted. The flip side of leadership is followership. It stands to reason that if leadership is important to performance, followership is important too. This statistic alone is telling when we consider how the concepts are perceived, used and integrated on and off the football field. A Google search for leadership in sport will provide about 142 million options by contrast, a search for followership in sport will provide only 371,000.