"So, ladies, I'm hoping we've all learned our lessons from last week, right? Let's review," Sam shouted from the front of the Squad 1 pack. She, most of all, had taken the loss personally, given her naturally ambitious nature. It was part of the reason she found herself at the front of her squad - there was nothing Samantha wanted more than to improve and be the best she could, and if that meant setting the squad pace, so be it. However, Sam knew that the squad's problems were a lot greater than her own morning run pace. PT was great and all, but Sam couldn't help but feel that her weakness in tactics and strategies and her general hardheadedness contributed to the squad's brutal loss.
Then again, she wasn't exactly the only one with co-operation problems. To Sam, it seemed like Squadron 1 was the "fun bunch" - just about all of them had a pretty severe personality quirk. Rei was increasingly more and more mechanical, Francis was obsessive-compulsive, and Liu freaked out if your breathing even remotely sounded like you were saying "AGS." Sam knew better than to use those as excuses or to hold those issues against anyone, but come on. She could name four other squads off the top of her head that had the team chemistry of a well oiled machine, regardless of their personal faults. Squad 1 was like a four year old tied two sticks in an L-shape and called it a gun.
Anyways, Sam began her Capture the Flag review session: "First off! How many times have we been told that communication is key? I'm no paragon of co-operation, but guys. Come on. If Laura or Nate have an idea, we should talk about it instead of running off and doing our own thing. Yeah, yeah, I know I'm a culprit, too, but we're a squad for a reason, right?
"Second! As I recall correctly, we completely failed to adapt to Squad 20's tactics shift. That feint they pulled caught us all with our pants down. Red Team had no idea what Blue was up to, and they carved us apart like a turkey dinner. As we've been told many times, adaptability saves lives. And from where I'm standing, or uh, running, we're all dead.
"And finally, I'm just gonna hammer in yet again that communication is massive. If one of us can't figure out what everyone else is doing, then that's it, game over."
Sam took half a moment to catch her breath, before concluding, "Now, I think I've just about covered all our areas of weaknesses from last week. Come on, do you guys like being at the back with ten extra kilos? I sure don't. We're a lot better than this, and we definitely do not belong at the back of the pack after getting demolished by another squad. So, any questions?" She glanced back to flash a smirk at her squadmates, something she did often in an attempt to keep things between everyone fairly light-hearted.
