Jim,

Had a new thought on what I would tell my team: 

“Think about the story you want to tell for the rest of your life.â€ 

Case in point: Three of my teammates and I walked onto separate tennis courts (I was 17) for our final matches for the South Carolina state championship in 1975. 
As a team, we had the team lead by two points (each win was one point).

Midway through my match, my teammates told me (as we were picking up balls at the back-to-back court fences) that they were losing. They all lost.

So I had to win to tie overall. 

I won the only three-set match I played during this tournament, and all of this after we got stuck in Columbia, SC, for a week due to rain and after a tornado hit the restaurant we visited one night and after late-night calls from our main opponents boasting about how the “hicks from the sticksâ€ would fold, and after our coach drove back to Conway to get more money to pay for our extended stay. 

After all, we did what we set out to do, which was to do the best we could do, which was a tie, and in the end the boys from a private school in Anderson, SC, who all had tennis lessons, whereas we had none, posed for a picture and let me hold the trophy.

We won and they won and, and years later, just like me, they are telling this story about how a tie was a dual win.

I still have the trophy for being the only one to win a seeded level that year and the inscription is simple: State Champion. 

So I won twice, once for myself and again for my team.  

In closing, we play sports for the stories, some good, some bad, and there is no greater motivation than wanting to tell a good story.