This article is about power and influence in social networks and their application to team sports. The article entitled “Game Plan - First Find the Leader,” published in BusinessWeek Online in August 2006, discusses the discovery of these social networking phenomena by Head Coach Sasho Cirovski of the University of Maryland Terrapins men’s soccer team.

After enjoying years of success in the league, in 2000, the Terps failed to make the NCAA tournament and ended their season in the basement of the Atlantic Coast Conference. As the team lost many of its players to professional teams and graduation, Coach Cirovski began to notice a lack of leadership on the field, despite selecting the team’s two best players as co-captains. It became clear to him that he was recruiting only talent, not leaders. This resulted in a total lack of team chemistry, and a frustrated group of talented student-athletes.

Coach Cirovski consulted his brother Vancho who suggested that the coach distribute a survey to the team- a survey similar to the one Vancho had used for organizational development in his company. “The results, Vancho said, would identify off-the-radar leaders. Also called social network analysis, such surveys, the results of which are plotted as a web of interconnecting nodes and lines representing people and relationships, are increasingly popular among corporate managers who want to visualize their informal organizational charts.” And identify the leaders they did.

After the results were complete, Coach Cirovski clearly identified one of the quietest and least celebrated recruits as the player with the biggest influence in the entire team network. The player was immediately named the third co-captain of the Terps. The team enjoyed instant success, rallying around their new tremendously effective leader. In the following seasons, the Terps made their way to four straight College Cup appearances (college soccer’s Final Four) and a national championship victory in 2005.

Coach Cirovski began strategically attempting to strengthen ties between specific players in his team network. He has fine tuned his recruiting strategies as well to take into account team chemistry on and off the field of play.

The concept of power and influence in social networks in the context of team sports is very interesting. It is unlike some of the negotiation examples we have discussed in class in which specific dollar values may be assigned to a network and the payoffs are devised based on a node’s location in the graph. In the case of the soccer team, it is difficult to quantify the value that can be divided between individuals in the team network. Instead of deriving payoffs and determining the rules and logistics of bargaining between nodes, this example relies on concepts discussed in class such as dependence, exclusion, satiation, and betweenness to determine those team members who would be the most effective leaders of the squad. All of this is done by applying the basic principles above to the network graph constructed using the results of the team survey.

The article discussed above can be found by clicking the link below:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_34/b3998437.htm