Peck's Theory

When thinking about a sense of community that I have been involved in, I think about the sports team that I have been apart of.  From the beginning of the season to the end, the team is always trying to become closer and create a sense of a community, or team in this matter, that greatly aligns with Peck's theory.  The team goes through a process to ultimately achieve their goals.  I will reference my senior year of basketball as the community.

The first stage, the pseudo community, the team is in offseason training and we begin to see who the leaders will be.  My senior year, we had six seniors and for a basketball team, that is a lot of one team.  Along with the seniors, we had four juniors that had played varsity the previous year.  The year before, our record was not what we were expecting.  So our senior year, we really pushed ourselves and that helped us come together more as a group and a unit.  I would say that the chaos stage occurred during our second conference game.  We had been thinking that we could win a conference championship and that we had the team to do it.  However, we lost our second conference game to a team that we definitely should not have lost to and the next night we almost lost to a team that we were better than.  At this point, we could either give into each other fighting and bickering or we could regroup and refocus on what our goals were as a team.  We chose the second option and that is where the third stage comes in.  We came together as a team and had a team meeting.  After that meeting we went on to have a great season and win the conference championship, our first in basketball in over 30 years.

Not only did we bring our team together as an authentic community, but the actual community came together behind us.  Our games were packed every night with people that may not have seen a game in years.  We felt good knowing that we had the community behind us and that by us coming together and not only winning games, but winning them as a team, we could bring so many people together.  The game truly was bigger than ourselves.