Picking Your Teammates – Team Makeup Tips

Are you trying to win the event? Or are you trying to go out there and have some fun and try something new? Or are you not expecting to win, but taking it seriously enough you would like to put the best performance you can together as a team and get a true GRID experience? Any of these are great approaches. How seriously you are taking it may influence the types of athletes you approach about being on your team. If having fun and trying something new is the goal, obviously physical ability matters a lot less than selecing teammates you will have fun with. Think about it.

Teammates must work well with others and be a cohesive unit. It doesn’t matter how physically talented an athlete is if they cannot be a good teammate. This is why friends/training partners are a great start. I’d say it’s better to have a cohesive group of ok athletes than a group of high talent, high ego athletes that can’t respect one another. That said, I’ve seen time and time again athletes come from completely different worlds and areas and be amazing teammates. So prior friendship is NOT a requirement at all, and almost always happens organically anyway if everyone is a good part of the team. Prior team sport experience is a good quality to look for if you don’t know a person well.

There are so many ways to approach your athletic team makeup, and many will work just fine… especially since not everyone is going out there with optimal performance as the primary goal. If it were me, going for optimal physical performance on the GRID, I think I would start with a big engine generalist, for both men and women, that can handle most requirements. In the GRID 6 format, since

teams are smaller, there is more crossover than would be typical for a 14 athlete GRID team. Meaning, a gymnastics specialist might need to do a few reps of the middle/light weight barbell whereas a true GRID gymnastics specialist might never touch a barbell in an entire season. So because of this, I think having at least one generalist in each gender that can be a workhorse in many areas on the GRID would be a great help to soak up a lot of that middle ground work and allow any specialists to shine on their specialty as much as possible. From there, having people PROFICIENT at the more extreme movements is what I would look for. Often times this will be athletes with a bias toward gymnastics or weightlifting… because if they naturally have a bias, they are more likely to have high proficiency in that movement. That said, sometimes generalists can also have the most proficiency in certain things. Soooo, that may not help at all, there are a ton of ways to skin a cat in this case… but to summarize, I might prioritize the generalist a bit more than I would in regular 14 athlete GRID teams. It may very well be that a team of all generalists will win, or it could be a team of very specific specialists that can stay in their lane the most. The beauty of this sport is that physical makeup is important, but it’s only ONE of many factors that directly relates to performance. Cohesiveness as a team, effective leadership, preparation, communication are all just as important and can easily make up for deficiencies elsewhere. No one really knows what the perfect formula is, and there are so many variables unique to each team, so there is no one size fits all. That is ALSO the beauty of this sport.