Teams can be broken up into great, good and not-so-good.

Most teams begin their seasons with the goal of being successful. What do they mean by successful? Well, most assuredly for the vast majority of teams it is winning. Maybe even winning a championship.

However wish all you want, but unfortunately championships are only won by the best of teams. The question becomes then, what makes some teams highly successful while others are just average or even fail?

There’s a myriad of factors that help to determine the successful teams from the ones that are not so great.

One obvious factor is that of talent. Yes, it certainly does take talent to win. I’ve often heard the phrase, you can’t make chicken salad out of you know what. Another saying is it’s not about the Xs and Os but rather the Jimmys and Joes.

I wholeheartedly believe both of those philosophies or sayings to be true. It does take some talent to win. However, I also concur with many coaches who would rather have decent players who work very hard than to have good players who hardly work.

If a team has talented players and they work very hard, they will be hard to beat. But if a team with talent fails to work, they will likely be beaten by teams with less talent who does work hard.

Why do some succeed where others fail? To answer such a question, let’s explore what factors separate the best teams from the rest. Again, be reminded that we are examining this aside from the talent that a team might have.

Let’s understand that teams that are successful are made up of players and coaches that buy in for the good of the whole. Players on great teams show up physically and mentally everyday ready to work and get better. They are motivated to be present and work tirelessly to improve both as individuals and as a team.

Players on average teams likely show up physically on a regular basis but they are not always present mentally. Some would rather be somewhere else much of the time. Thus, those teams often times go through the motions and fail to use their time wisely to improve.

While the great teams get everything out of their practice times, average teams are watching the clock ready to get out of practice to do other things.

Average teams often lack leadership while great teams have leaders who are not afraid to step to the forefront and lead their team. The leaders of those teams hold themselves and their teammates accountable for their effort, actions and performance.

Successful teams have coaches and players that put the good of the team first while those teams that struggle often times will have a player or players that would rather focus on individual performance than team success. In other words, for the good teams, there is no I in team but rather the focus is on we.

To achieve greatness as a team, each individual part must leave their ego at the door and sacrifice for the good of the whole. Sacrificing is another key factor among successful teams. To sacrifice is to go all in for the good of the team.

Perhaps it means giving up individual stats or accolades. It might mean missing a fun time event to attend a team activity. It could mean sitting the bench and playing your role on the team. The best teams don’t make excuses. Rather they confront their failures when they occur and quickly set out to fix what is causing the problem.

Bad teams are full of excuses and excuse makers who don’t deal with failure very well at all. On a bad team, there are likely to be a lot of “it’s not my faults” being uttered.

There is a lot of finger-pointing taking place on those teams. They will spend their energies not being introspective and looking for solutions but rather dwelling on the problems.

Good teams will identify a problem, collaborate on a solution and get to work rectifying it in short order. Speaking of work, good teams are not afraid of hard work. They do not look for short cuts.

If we were to be honest, we must admit that in sports as in life in general there are no short cuts to success. For most, the path to success requires a lot of hard work. It usually does not require the intelligence of a rocket scientist to figure out that hard work is so often the key to success in many things, sports and life’s endeavors in general.

So the good teams will work hard because they understand that is the key to winning. The not so good teams? They look for short cuts around working. They will say they want to win but talk is cheap. Again, as I’ve stated before, most will say they want to win but their willingness to prepare to win is what will set teams apart from others.

It’s as the old saying goes, “everyone wants to go to Heaven, but they don’t want to die.” The sports translation is you want to win, you must pay the price to win. That takes hard work, sweat, sacrifice and may other things.

Will it all be fun? Nope. Will it be worth it? Most likely yes because even if the scoreboard does not reflect kindly on you, the benefits gained by the work put into the cause will be worth the sacrifice.

Yes, there are many differences between poor, average, good and great athletes and teams. Those differences are far ranging. We will explore more features that set great athletes and teams apart from the rest in future columns.