8/14 Getting To Know Each Other Pool Training

A thousand mile journey starts with one step. -Taoist saying

I was anxious to get the group together for their first session so all the girls could meet each other.  The entire purpose of today was to have the girls get to know each other.  One of the things that I am really going to concentrate on with all of my teams this year is making sure that all the girls are getting to know each one of their teammates at the beginning of the year.  I would like to do some sort of team building exercise at the start of all of our sessions.

I) Team Building

a) Human Pretzel: Girls were in groups of 5-6 players.  All the players put their hands in the middle and they have to hold onto someone elses hand with each of their hands.  When I say "Go" the team that can untangle all the hands, without letting go, and end up in a circle first, wins. 

We did that 3 different times and we mixed the groups up each time.

b) Team Races: After we finished the human pretzel activity we had them stay linked up to their partners and had the groups race to the half line and back while staying connected in the circle.  After each race we gave the teams time to plan how to get faster in the next race.  By the end of the races the teams had figured out that communicating when to step and how people were facing in the circle were the keys to going the fastest.

Another main point that I am trying to get across to the girls is to take time to think and plan things out before going into action.  I want to get away from kids doing things because the coach tells them to.  They need to understand why they are doing it and figure out the best way to do it for themselves.

II) After we finished up the races we divided the girls up into 4 8v8 teams and we played a mini tournament.  It was a fun way to start the year and all of the coaches, Cook, Chad, Evan, and myself all were on different teams and played with the girls.

To wrap up training I asked the girls to take the time over the weekend to call every one of their new teammates and talk to them for a couple of minutes.  A lot of the girls looked horrified when I asked this.  I thought it would be the opposite but maybe they are not at the age where they like to talk on the phone all the time.  Or maybe this generation will simply text message 8,000 times a day since that was the first question they asked me.  "Can't we just text them?"

I told them that they had to call them and if they needed to write out some basic questions to start the conversation up, they should do it.

Training and uniform fitting wrapped up around 9pm and I was on my way to Chicago for the Eclipse Select event with our U12's.  This tournament will be a great place for me to see some of the top U13 teams from all over the country and I will get a good idea of what we need to work on.