Team Building 101

Jeff Janssen writes in his book, Championship Team Building, “Success = Talent + Teamwork”.  It is amazing though how few teams focus on the “teamwork” aspect away from the field.  At the youth soccer level many teams consider team building just doing something as a group outside of practices and games.  These social events are important and are definitely better than nothing but having a more focused approach to team building can pay off for teams willing to put in the time to do it.

 The first step to starting team building with your youth soccer team is for the coach (and the players if they are old enough) to evaluate the team in important areas such as goal setting, cohesion, player roles, commitment, communication, and how the team deals with conflict.  This will force you to see where the possible weaknesses might be on your team and where is the best place to start your program.

It is best then to focus on one aspect at a time especially with younger teams.  So let’s say your team needs the most work on communication then you would set that up as your primary goal. Next, you will want to come up with a plan on how to address and work on communication with your team.  This could be with some short activities before or after practices or you could plan a few team building sessions to have more time to devote to the topic.

So you have evaluated your team, came up with an area of focus, scheduled some team building games and activities so you are done right? Wrong! The most important part of team building activities is relating it back to what the team learned and how they are going to implement that into the rest of their season.