A Weekend in Nebraska - Day 1

We left for Omaha today at 3PM.  Four other Bangu girls teams were also making the trip down and I was looking forward to a good weekend of soccer.

My goal for the weekend was for us to come out of it as a tighter-knit group.  I was excited about the games for sure, but more interested in the team bonding aspect of the trip.  The girls were going to stay in rooms together, 3 or 4 girls per room.  From our parent group, we asked for volunteer chaperones who would stay in near by rooms at the hotel.  I knew some parents may have been a little hesitant to send their 12 or 13 year old girl off on her own on a soccer trip, but if anyone had any complaints, they kept silent.  Sending the girls on a bus without their parents for a weekend to Omaha was one of the points of contention last year with the core group of the Renegades, so I was sensitive to the issue.  One non-chaperoning parent elected to drive down separately, though I think this was more from a soccer-junky perspective and having a free weekend to watch his daughter, rather than from a protective standpoint.

Our team shared one 56-passenger bus with the U13 White team, and the U15 Blue team.  The two U14 teams (Blue and White) shared the other bus.  I knew that I wanted to do some team bonding activities on the bus ride down, so I asked my girls to try and show up a bit early and secure seats for all our team in the back of the bus.  Some of the U15 parents had gone out to purchase Subway sandwiches for the girls, bagged sliced apples, water/Gatorade, and Granola Bars, and the plan was to drive straight through, hoping to arrive in Omaha in around 6 hours.

Since it got dark around 5PM and I needed light for our team binding activity, as soon as we got out of the metro area and onto the open road, I got the girls together to do some work.  Amos Magee, my longtime friend and teammate, current co-worker in the MN Thunder front office, and current head coach of the team, ran a similar activity with our office staff a few weeks back.  I was impressed with the results and wanted to try and do something similar with the girls.  I purchased four different colors (yellow, blue, pink, and orange) of colored paper and cut the sheets into fourths.  I brought a number of Sharpie markers and masking tape and brought these along as well.  To the very back window of the bus I taped an index card labeled "Hate it/Doesn't work".  About halfway up the bus on the same window side I taped up a card labeled "Love it/Works well".  The idea was for the girls to write down on their colored paper different items or aspects pertaining to certain categories, and then tape these pieces of paper up somewhere in the Hate it/Doesn't Work - Love it/Works well spectrum.  The different colors of paper represented different categories.  Yellow was Team/Teammates, Blue was Training/Games, pink was Parents, and Orange was Anything Else.  So, on the yellow paper, a girl could write anything down pertaining to the team as a whole or her teammates, then stick it to the window indicating how she felt about the item she wrote down.  For example, if a girl thought that other girls on the team were "clickie" or unfriendly, the player might write "team chemistry" and tape it somewhere on the Hate It/Doesn't work end of the bus window.  If another girl loved to travel to events, she might write "out of state events" on a piece of Blue paper and tape it towards the Love It/Works well end.

This was a good activity for me as a coach to try and discover what the girls really like and don't like about what we are doing.  Though each girl had her own take on things, there were some comments that appeared in the same general areas multiple times.

Love It/Works Well

• Carpools from Woodbury (from the Woodbury based contingent)
• Fun practices
• Out of state events
• Playing up an age group
• Player commitment
• Funny coach
• Our uniforms
• Challenge in training
• Our warm ups
• My parents' support and the time they take to drive me to practice
• My teammates
• Our old pink shirts
•  My parents always tell me to do my best

Hate It/Doesn't Work

• Parents yelling at games
• Not enough practices
• My parents could try better to make it to more of my games
• Some people hang out with the same people too much
• Mark has to say "Listen" way too much
• Sometimes we don't work hard enough in practice
• Some players are negative towards others
• My dad drives too slow to practice and everyone passes us
• Too many players, not enough playing time
• When my parents tell me that I did something great when I didn't
•  Don't know some of my teammates that well
• Our gray training shirts
• Parents can be negative on the sidelines and can be too loud
• Mark always has to get our team's attention when trying to say something