There’s more to a good team than just talent, strategy, and philosophy. The best teams have a high level of trust, respect, and a sense of purpose. This doesn’t happen by accident. Building a strong and healthy team is intentional.
There’s an old adage that says, “One day the winter will come calling and it will ask what you did all summer long.” You reap what you sow, and this is no different for your athletes, your team, or even yourself. The off season is a great time to prepare for the upcoming season. It’s a great time to build strong habits.
You don’t perform well in November if you didn’t prepare properly in October, September, or August. This isn’t just when it comes to X’s and O’s and technical skills. Your team can develop bonds, relationships, and a mentality that prepares them for what’s to come.
Team building must remain consistent and intentional. Getting along with one another is no guarantee that you’ll experience success, but it’s rare for a team to achieve its potential when its members are not connected.
As you consider what kind of team building to engage in during the off season, here are a few questions to ask yourself …
- What type of team building will you do?
- When will (or should) you do it?
- How long will it last?
- What rules, policies, or administrative factors will you need to adhere to?
- What kind of resources do you have available?
- Can you execute the idea with your particular sport?
- What are your team dynamics?
- Will they be able to do the activity physically?
- Are you addressing their mental health at all?
- What are the goals of each activity?
- What does your team need?
Take your team building serious by being intentional and having a plan, but make sure that you never deviate from the fun aspect. You want to make sure that any team building ideas are designed for engagement and connection amongst your team members.
Here are 11 team building ideas you can utilize during the off season to build a strong culture…
- Send notes
- Competitions
- Unofficial game cheerleaders
- Practice cheerleaders
- Go nuts for donuts
- Zoom creativity
- Develop a new skill
- Tailgating
- Virtual Tailgating
- Learn together
- Christmas break
The best programs make team building an important part of what they do. It’s not just an activity they do at the start of the season to check off a box or hope that the event carries over into the season. It’s not just a one-time activity. Team building is an on-going process. It’s a journey, rather than a destination.
Send notes
Nothing fancy with this one. Just encourage one another. Be intentional about encouraging one team member each day. If you want to challenge yourself, encourage every team member every day. Find as many positive things as you can to say to them. Alternate between sending text messages and actual notes. As a coach, you could provide your athletes with some stamped envelopes and cards.
Write notes to others letting them know how much you appreciate them or are thankful for something they’ve done. Teachers, professors, other coaches, janitors, administrators are all a good start. You could also do family members or community members that have done good things. This is easy to do and will mean a lot since handwritten notes are a rarity.
The notes that go from team member to team member are very encouraging. The notes that go from team member to community member just builds positive habits of encouragement and gratitude that will carry over into your season.
Competitions
Compete against each other individually or split up into teams. You can do the same thing each week, or you can change up the games each time. There’s no limit to your imagination on this. It can be games related to your sport, it could be common card or board games, it could be social media contests, it could be things such as trivia or charades. Keep their competitive juices flowing while staying connected with one another.
If you split up into teams, you could even do a situation in which each team comes up with their own game and rules. This would be like a team having home-court advantage. Each week, a different group would come up with the game.
Essentially this whole competition concept stems from what corporate offices do when they come up with fun things to do (office Olympics) when the boss is away, or families do to pass the time on long car rides. Be creative and have fun.
Unofficial game cheerleaders
Pick a contest for a team and split up into smaller groups to serve as cheerleaders. Team members can make signs and noisemakers. They can come up with cheers. They can find ways to get the crowd involved. If it’s hot out, they could give out popsicles. Maybe even have mystery judges in the crowd (another coach, teacher, administrator, etc…) that determines which group did the best job of generating excitement.
Practice cheerleaders
Take 30 minutes to go cheer on another team at your school during their training session. Make some signs, paint your faces, get some noise makers, whatever the other coach will allow and go cheer on the other athletes. Yes, this might be cheesy but have fun with it. Your athletes love cheering on their classmates at games, so just extend this into a practice session. Maybe even keep it a secret from the other team until your athletes show up.
Go nuts for donuts
Take donuts to a different group of people each week (or day). If you have 15 athletes and there are 15 weeks in the summer, then each athlete gets a week. Each athlete chooses a business, cause, organization, or group of people to receive donuts. The athlete or coach could deliver the donuts. Delivery could also be arranged. You could also include a note from the athlete, coach, or the whole team. Show your appreciation to first responders, the janitors at each school in your district, nurses, doctors, dentists, crossing guards, sponsors, non-profits, etc…
Zoom creativity
You may be all Zoomed out from virtual meetings, but these types of interactions are still better than emails or texts for staying connected during the off season. You want to be creative and keep these virtual meetings fresh, however. Utilize the Google search engine and type in “creative zoom calls for students” and you can find a million different ideas.
If you choose to have multiple sessions in a week, then try to have some variety with the calls. For instance, one day is X’s & O’s or sport-related stuff, one day is focused on silliness or entertainment, one day is team building, and one day might consist of a competition (especially good if you were supposed to have a game that night).
Have guest speakers, surprise judges for the competitions, allow athletes to take selfies/pictures/videos of the zoom sessions themselves, eat the same food at the same time as you would be if you were together (all of you can get the same pizza restaurant to deliver at the same time).
Stay connected but guard against boredom. Essentially, you’re putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig but it now looks a little better. Dress up your virtual (Zoom) meetings by calling them something different or putting more energy into the planning so that you can maximize your engagement.
Develop a new skill
Each team member can learn a new skill during the off season. It could be a musical instrument, a magic trick, juggling, doing hair, or even a new trick related to their sport. As they are learning the new skill, they can update teammates. As an added bonus, they can try and teach a teammate (or the whole team) their new skill.
Tailgating
Tailgating at another sport’s event can bring your team together. A football game is where a typical tailgate occurs, but you can do this for nearly any sport. Even during the winter, you could do a basketball game, but the tailgating might take place inside the lobby while the grills are just outside the doors. The main point is to get together and have fun supporting another team.
Virtual Tailgating
Just because you can’t get together physically doesn’t mean you still can’t have fun. You can still tailgate from afar by doing it virtually. You can have pre-game food and activities that lead into a big watch party. Look at what you’d be doing at a live tailgate party and see how you can adjust it to fit a virtual setup.
Maybe your school’s football team is far away at a big game. Maybe a big game is during a break and your athletes aren’t around. Maybe the event you want to celebrate isn’t even related to your school. Maybe it’s a World Cup game, the Super Bowl, or even the Kentucky Derby. Whatever the reason, look for ways to have fun even if you can’t get together.
Team members can jump online holding up signs or balloons or having celebratory virtual backgrounds. Everyone could eat the same kind of food (e.g. pizza, wings, hot dogs) or you could have the same restaurant deliver to all your athletes. There might even be sponsorship opportunities. Your athletes could even take turns videotaping and documenting various times of the party from their perspective similar to if they were all at the game in-person.
Use social media to provide live updates to the rest of the world about how much fun you are having and how much school spirit you have (or how much so-and-so team is going to whoop the other team). Have fun with this!
Learn together
The off season is a great time to gain more knowledge on a subject, especially as it relates to your team. This can be even more effective when your whole team is learning, growing, and developing together. This could be accomplished through book studies, online curriculum, or discussing topical stories from the news or the world of sports.
There are a lot of great books out there, but we’d recommend starting with …
- “The Team Captain’s Leadership Manual” by Jeff Janssen
- “The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork” by John C. Maxwell
- “The Power of a Positive Team” by Jon Gordon
- “The Bus Trip” by Jamy Bechler
- “Stick Together” by Kate Leavell
You can also find a full list of recommend books (organized by topic) at JamyBechler.com/recommendedbooks
As far as online curriculums go, TheLeadershipPlaybook.com has hundreds of two-minute video lessons that help athletes understand how to be better teammates and more positive leaders. It has both a student-athlete component and a coach component to the program.
Discussing current events can also bring a team together. It can also serve to train your athletes on how (or how not) to act. Talking about an athlete losing their cool, a team overcoming adversity, or an athlete achieving their goals can motivate and educate your athletes.
Christmas break
Christmas (or winter) break provides a number of great opportunities to build team chemistry and have fun. Realize that not all of your athletes may celebrate Christmas the same way (or even celebrate it at all) so be sensitive and wise about this. However, here are 10 ideas that may work for your team or generate other ideas that you can use…
- Decorate lockers in a holiday theme
- Make tree ornaments
- Elf on a shelf
- Ring bells for the Salvation Army
- Parents day out to go Christmas shopping
- Serve food
- Give gifts (special gifts, white elephant gift exchange, secret Santa)
- Bake off
- Gingerbread house decorating
- Ugly sweater contest
Dig your well before you’re thirsty
Harvey Mackay wrote a book entitled “Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty”. The basic premise was to prepare now. It’s similar to what John F. Kennedy’s quote, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” It’s hard to fix your roof when it’s raining just like it’s hard to build your team (or fix your team) once the season begins.
The off season is a great time to think about how you can build a stronger culture and a better team. If strong relationships are formed now, then a stronger bond will exist during the season. When difficulties come your way, you’ll want strong bonds to get you through them.
Your team develops daily, not in a day. Build daily habits and start now. Build your team’s chemistry starting today so they are stronger three months from now.
Abraham Lincoln liked to say, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first six sharpening my axe.” Lincoln had split rails with an ax as a young man, so he knew the value of a sharp ax. This offseason is your opportunity to sharpen your axe, so you’re able to maximize your team’s potential during the season.