Teambuilding to Start the Season on the Same Foot

“A player who makes a team great is more valuable than a great player.”

--John Wooden

For decades, coaches have been improving player development by attaining and transferring knowledge on technical, tactical, and physical skills and concepts. However, in most team environments, social and emotional development is still often overlooked. A coach can have a great collective of individual players, but if the team doesn’t work cohesively toward a common goal, it will get no further than a group of less talented individuals. In today’s push to accelerate players to the highest levels, we’re missing out on the social and emotional progressions, especially on the heels of a pandemic that continues to affect some children (and adults) years later. And when young players cycle through teams like a revolving door, at some point the lack of social and emotional development will catch up when their skills begin to plateau.

For as long as I’ve been teaching and coaching, I’ve turned to John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success. Wooden, the longtime basketball coach at UCLA in the 1940s through 1970s, wasn’t the first coach to emphasize team culture or social development. But he certainly found a model that matched his own values. From 1967-1973, Wooden’s teams won 7 of their 10 NCAA titles, back when a team had to win the conference to get to the NCAA tournament. Even with NBA legends Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Bill Walton, Wooden’s teams exemplified teamwork both on and off the court.

What made Wooden’s methods uniques was that his goal was never to win. His goal was what he perceived to be Competitive Greatness, or playing the best a team could play. Contrary to the modern era, where many attempt to prioritize product over process, Wooden was a strong proponent of the idea that winning is a potential benefit of performance. Teams can play great and lose or play poor and win, so controlling the process and performance became his team’s mission.

Building a cohesive team is an entirely different coaching skillset, but devoting early parts of the season to teach essential team skills can lead to elevated performances down the line. If a team thrives early, coaches can reinforce team skills that are firmly in place, while a drop in performance could result in identifying specific team skills to practice in future training sessions. Once a foundation is set, a team moves closer to reaching Competitive Greatness.

Some terms have been revised

Expecting players to naturally improve how they interact is like expecting every back heel to end up in the back of the net. Children and young teens (even adults) benefit from learning how social and emotional components influence the team’s performance in positive and negative ways. If the goal is to build the best team then practicing how to function as a team and how to respond to expected team situations becomes just as important as teaching technical, tactical, and physical skills.

How do we teach team skills?

Spencer Kagan, a longtime educator and proponent for cooperative learning, uses the acronym PIES when determining if an activity enhances cooperative learning. Kagan believes there’s a difference between a team activity and one that builds cooperation. Team sports, by nature, can be viewed as cooperative

PIES stands for:

P- Positive Interdependence

I- Individual Accountability

E- Equal Participation

S- Simultaneous Interaction

Positive interdependence encompasses the relationship teammates share when relying on each other to reach common goals. Individual accountability holds every team member responsible and eliminates the person in the group who watches everyone else do the work. This is different than star players getting more action. In some ways, individual accountability also involves managing players, especially when one player’s mistakes are blips but that same player highlights others’ mistakes as if they were apocalyptic.

Every player has a role or function in a team. Some roles look and feel different than others. Equal participation in a cooperative sense ensures every player contributes. Whether it’s to score goals or prevent them, ever player should know their role and be actively fulfilling those roles at the same time. One of the hardest jobs for a coach is maintaining the motivation and preparation of players not in the game. However, whether coaching six year-olds or sixteen year-olds, the last player on the depth chart should feel as important as the first.

When teaching team skills, I’ve blended cooperative adventure learning models with competitive environments that relate more directly to the what our teams will experience together. Though many educators try to separate cooperation and competition, I believe they can be taught together. If we want our teams to function as a cooperative unit, players need to be mindful of the impact from single-minded winning, which can lead to cheating, implosions, a lack of development, or even the loss of satisfaction associated with a strong performance because of a poor result. Instead, we want the satisfaction of winning to come from the positive social and emotional environment when a team, not just certain individuals, collaborates equally toward a common goal.

Players learn from the culture coaches create.

(Coming Soon: 5 Soccer Teambuilders Coaches Can Use Right Now)