Merging Forces: The Dual Perspectives of a Joint-team in Collegiate Quadball

Aug 25

By: Gabe Templeton and Shane McConaghie

I am Gabe Templeton, the coach for the James Madison University (JMU) half of Virginia Reunited for the 2023-24 season. I started playing quadball in September of last year. Because I started so late, I have only ever heard stories about what it’s like to be on a college quadball team that does not have to drive two hours to get a true team practice in. My dream since the start of this year has always been to be able to ref/volunteer/spectate a Virginia Tech Quadball versus JMU Quadball game before the current Freshmen graduate, so my answers reflect that goal more than any on-field goal.

I’m Shane McConaghie, coach of the Virginia Tech (VT) portion of the Virginia Reunited (VRU) joint team for both the ‘22-’23 and ‘23-’24 USQ seasons and a player since the beginning of the ‘21-‘22 USQ season. I was fortunate to get to play on an all-Virginia Tech my first year and grateful to have helped found the Virginia Reunited joint team to contribute to my playing experience these last two years.

What prompted the creation of the joint team?

Gabe: JMU was never even supposed to be a part of Virginia Reunited. Initially, the plan was to play on our own at the start of the 22-23 season. After some really poor recruiting, we made the decision to tack on to Virginia Reunited, a combined team with both WVU and Virginia

Tech. I had never played an official game before the start of the 22-23 season, so I did not understand the joint team process at all, I only knew that they had found a way for us to play an official tournament.

Shane: From VT’s perspective, the joint team was created due to a lack of players on our end (we only currently had about 5-7). Thus, we reached out to West Virginia University (WVU), who were currently a similar sized program, in the interest of becoming a joint-team. To start that 2022-2023 season, we played a 3-game unofficial series against UVA, where we came up with the idea for the team name “Virginia Reunited”. Then, in the month or so after that series, we received a message from JMU asking for them to join in, which we were happy to do in order to obtain more numbers for substitutions so that we would consistently have around 13 players per tournament.

What have been the positives?

Gabe: I think JMU’s explosive recruiting numbers (five standing members at the end of the 22-23 season to sixteen standing members in 23-24) can be attributed to the joint team. Being able to get people out to practices knowing for certain they can play a game of the sport in a competitive atmosphere rather than hoping that you can get people to stick around for practice indefinitely is very beneficial to recruiting. The other thing, which might be a negative to schools who played us last year, is the immediate success we saw because we were essentially pulling together an all-star roster across the 2 schools. The very first tournament I went to, VRU went 4-0 with very little competition. This helped me, a new player at the time, gain a lot of confidence and a drive to come back for a second tournament.

Shane: Similarly, a massive positive of the joint team for Virginia Tech was the promise that we would have the numbers to not only meet the minimum requirements for an official game, but to actually have a couple lines of substitutions. This guaranteed that returners would be able to continue playing and gave new recruits the prospect of playing with a more well-rounded team. Another notable positive is how players gained the opportunity to meet and build deeper relationships with Quadball players at another school. For instance, I had limited interaction with players on other teams outside of tournament games my first year. But by being on a joint-team, I was afforded the opportunity to interact with and make friends within the Quadball community at schools other than my own. All those joint-practices (and ensuing parties), team dinners, and getting to experience tournaments as an amalgamation of 2-3 schools built up of a community of current and former VRU players will extend beyond the years of the joint-team.

What have been the negatives?

Gabe: Money is always a problem in this sport, and gas in the Mid-Atlantic is not particularly cheap. The obvious negative aside, The biggest negative to me has always been the disconnect because of the distance. I think it’s hard to get people interested in the sport because the time commitment to the sport dramatically increases with a joint team. JMU had one player who was absolutely into the sport, but couldn’t make the time commitment required for practices and tournaments happen. At some points in the semester, we’ll have months where every Saturday is booked for six weeks from 9 AM to 4 or 5 PM. This has led to a problem with our sister club in JMU, Quiz Bowl, where players have had to choose between whether they wanted to attend a Quadball joint practice or a quiz bowl tournament, and it has definitely diminished our rosters or affected our ability to practice more than once.

Shane: The other obvious negative, as Gabe hinted at, is the limited ability to develop chemistry in practice together as a team. While JMU and VT are only 2 hours apart, a 4-hour round trip led to us only managing about 2-3 joint practices per semester. Another notable negative, particularly on the VT side of things, is the distribution of positions across the two schools. As it worked out, VT only brought 1 beater (shoutout Jimbo) to the VRU team, hence he unfortunately had to practice chaser drills for a large portion of VT’s weekly practices, until we got to the merged quadball and beater part of practice at the end. The last negative that I’ll mention is the diminished amount of playing time, particularly for our valuable new players, that results from being a joint-team. Combining players from two schools innately means that there will be more people expecting to play, thus resulting in less playing time per person. Conversely, being your own team and bringing only 10-11 players to a tournament results in a large amount of playing time for each player, which, while tiring, provides a lot of in-game experience. (Example of chemistry problems? Did Jimbo ever express any frustrations about being the only beater from Teach? How did the VT rookies feel about the amount of play time they got?).

How do y'all manage having multiple "head" coaches?

Gabe: My motto for the year this year has been “know your role, and give the best you can to do that.” I think that’s how Shane and I have handled it. We communicate really well, and we defer to each other whenever one of us doesn’t know the answer. Last year, Colin Bourn coached the team in its entirety, so Shane and I had seen how to coach a joint team. This year, we found a rhythm that worked really great for us. Towards the end of the year, JMU’s recruiting was immaculate, so I ended up knowing the playstyle of a majority of the players on the team much better, just because I practiced with them 3 times a week. This kind of shifted into me playing less minutes than I normally would but using tournaments as a way to coach our players to prepare for the USQ Cup. I also personally enjoyed the concept of Shane as an on-field leader - as a hoop defender primarily, Shane sees the field better on defense than I do at the top of a 2-2 zone. He is also arguably the best triple threat scorer in USQ. It made sense for Shane to be the on-field leader while I made sure that the players from JMU were learning and doing what was necessary to create points and stops surrounding Shane.

Shane: To elaborate on our strong communication, before every tournament, we would always discuss and develop our lines and strategies for the teams we were preparing to play. This gave us a clear gameplan going into a tournament and made it much easier to facilitate substitutions when one or both of us were on the field. Additionally, Gabe and I both had different coaching strengths that we were able to combine for the betterment of the team. As Gabe is a more technically-minded coach, he is strong in recognizing and preparing strategies for the teams we were facing. To complement that, I tried to fill in the more inspirational-leader side of the coaching role, which I believe created an ideal coaching chemistry in hindsight.

How do you develop team chemistry?

Gabe: If I’m being real, I think we might have had better team chemistry than some of the other Mid-Atlantic schools. Maybe my judgment is clouded, but I felt like the positive forces of certain players - notably James Williams, Daiva Daulys, Elizabeth Nolen, and Cam Speaker - made VRU feel like home. I think the best thing future joint teams can do is foster positivity. I was not a big hug person before quadball, but the very first thing Daiva did to me when I arrived at the tournament was ask my name, tell me we were playing together, and gave me a hug. I had no clue I would be playing with her, but she extended that helping hand. I think the generic answer to building team chemistry would be to get food and watch movies, but I don’t think of those as the moments that made me feel connected. The deeper, personal connections are what made Reunited feel like home.

Shane: Gabe basically covered it, but in my own words I’ll just add that everyone’s open-mindedness and welcoming nature highly contributed to us being able to foster a caring joint team culture. One particular moment that comes to mind is our first VRU team party, where I remember everyone being welcoming and friendly to each other in our first times’ interacting outside of Quadball. Another core aspect of this developed chemistry and culture came down to combining or participating in each school’s traditions. Some examples include: playing Enter Sandman before games (A VT tradition); singing “Country Roads” after a tournament (a WVU tradition); and starting games with 3 calls of “Lets Go” separated by the 3 responses of “Mountaineers”, “Hokies”, and “Duuuuuuuuuukes” (a JMU tradition).

With your experience, would you recommend the joint team program?

Gabe: I think that schools need to prioritize being independent. This year on VRU, we played as many different teams at USQ Cup as we had all year - partially because the Mid-Atlantic has been struggling, but also because by joining together, VT and JMU removed one team from the App-5 Conference. I think best practice for joint teams right now is essentially using the program as a method of returning to the pre-club/college-split days without destroying the college game. My hope and dream is for North Carolina quadball to have a ‘Durham United’ style of team until Duke and all the other schools in the area can pool together. I think that is the way forward for Quadball if they want to keep developing new teams - Reaching out to larger schools, finding one player willing to try to start a club, then having that person not only recruit at their school, but also recruit at nearby universities. One incredibly far dream I have for JMU is to at some point foster an Eastern Mennonite University coalition, that way EMU will hopefully have its own program years down the road.

Shane:Having now been part of a joint team for my last 2 years of college Quadball, I can absolutely recommend it. Sure, there are parts that kinda suck, as mentioned in the negatives above. However, even beyond the benefit of having more numbers to play, the culture that is developed between two schools becomes something immaculate. I aspire to see these schools redevelop into their own programs and go head-to-head again one day (Go Hokies lol) and I think that the joint-team program has given us a better chance to make that a reality.

naresh edala