Team Building Fuels Sustainable Success
With the start of the club season underway, teams are under an extreme time crunch to learn their offensive systems, rotations, and most importantly, learn how to play together.
Tryouts can be nerve wracking, those first practices may be a little awkward where you’ll have some athletes who have played together their whole club careers, others may be new to the program, and some might not be happy with the team they are on. As a coach, you organize movie nights, games, outings, and other “fun” activities and everything will be just peachy right? Not quite.
“The worry is that a divide or cliques could form within the team from the onset. You want everyone to feel welcome, respected, and comfortable with each other sooner rather than later,” said Scott Spies who is the Head Coach of Milwaukee Sting 15 Gold. The whole Milwaukee Sting program utilizes team building in the very first week of their clubs coming together
Emily Bennett, a former club coach and current Neenah High School Head Coach says, “You can do the best drills in the world with an amazing group of athletes and still not see success if you aren’t working on those connections between players. The results from your efforts in team building are going to be visible when you get in tough situations in matches or when you have conflict between players.”
Brian Kenney of Wisconsin Team Extreme puts on team building workshops for teams and groups at all levels.Neenah High School, Milwaukee Sting, and many other high school and college programs are going with experts in team building. Brian Kenney, of Team Exteme Wisconsin (www.teamextremewisconsin.com), specializes in putting on team building workshops where he focuses on team dynamics, leadership, and communication through various challenges, tasks, and icebreakers.
“Often team building can be a tone setting activity that helps all newcomers to the program feel welcomed and valued and immediately provides an instant connection to the program,” said Kenney. “More often than not, the teams that invest in annual and ongoing team building type events and activities have greater chances of more success with their programs in the long run.”
“I really want athletes to fall in love with the process of being on a team and what that entails. I want them to become servant leaders for their teammates and really focus on growing the roots of the program versus picking the fruit off the tree. I really want to help grow the program and get the message across about importance of positive human connections.
Kenney’s activities will be challenging such as how to put a puzzle together, a full court memory, blindfolds, mousetraps, or a “fishing” game. Athletes will do the activity, debrief, and try the activity again.
Bennett sees the value in having an expert outside of her team come in and help the athletes with discovering qualities within themselves.
“While the games/challenges are what the girls tend to remember the most, they are really discovering a lot about themselves and each other from the discussion afterwards. This is why I believe it’s important to have the knowledge (or have an expert like Brian) with you while doing team building so you know what types of questions to ask to promote good conversation.
Team building isn’t just one day, it is a constant journey throughout the season. A one day workshop is great, but being able to revisit these activities, conversations, and the lessons learned are what need to be revisited throughout the year as the team continues to evolve. Bennett believes, “The strongest and best teams HAVE to have conflict in order to be successful. Talking through those tough issues and hard conversations help the players build stronger bonds and establish relationships based on trust,”