Team Building Days and Leadership
By Dan Barto, Director of Player Development PTC and The Basketball Academy
We spent Friday morning on the court doing numerous team building activities. These drills including team intensity defensive concepts, reaction drills for team passing and toughness drills. Our players are currently overtrained. Doing three hours of training 5-6 days per week for the last four weeks has broken the player’s bodies and minds to the lowest levels. By bringing the players into team mode we felt that creating positive energy with these types of drills would be a valuable lesson for future competition.
We structured the lesson as follows:
Coaches came in with lots of positive energy. Let's be honest, 7 AM was early on a Friday the fifth straight day of three hour training sessions. Also being a heavy testing week in the schools it really IS the coach’s job to lead the planning and energy output to maximize the week.
We have a clapping, chanting and rhythm sequences lead by one of the best young coaches in the country named Vince Walden. After a quick dose of motivation we all could feel the lift in energy
1.) Defensive intensity drills
Each of the teams was spread out on their own half court. We challenged them during some foot fires and closeouts to come together. Slowly the competitive chanting and energy rose to a level where the weak links starting bringing it. After the closeouts and sliding we progressed to add a "taking a charge sequence". During this drill we stopped to talk about personal accountability and finishing the play. This is what I call the “personal "fourth quarter" where the weak get exposed and do not finish plays and the strong are willing to sacrifice their bodies not for the good of the team because it is great basketball execution. The more great execution teams have from individuals the more the team comes together. We finished the sequence with the same drill. Only during this sequence after each player took the charge the rest of the team mates sprinted over to help the player off the ground in celebration of the great individual basketball play. The energy and emotion was bone chilling. To put an exclamation point of the whole sequence we had each of the coaches take a charge and the players from all of the teams pick the coaches up.
By this time we had spectators and coaches from all of the other sports entering the gym smiling, clapping, and enjoying what sports and practice is all about.
After a quick water break we brought the kids in to talk about creating positive energy and how great every kid was feeling at that moment. We asked them if they thought they would have that much fun when they arrived in the gym that morning and the answer was an overwhelming "no".
Moving next into the passing drills we talked of game situations and how many times teams make runs early in games or come back late in games. The emotion tied into those moments of team building is amazing.
2.) Four Corner Passing
This is a great drill for young teams learning to work together. The players are lined up in groups of two. A group was located on each elbow and each block. The person in the front of the line has the ball. Going clockwise the players must pass the ball to the second person in each line. The passer must follow their pass and the receiver gives a second pass back to the original passer. The original passer then takes the ball to the inside shoulder of the original receiver and completes a handoff. The original receiver takes the ball and continues the clockwise rotations.
The communication and execution by the group must be perfect or the sequencing goes bad and "turnovers" starts occurring. The players will drop passes, not know which way to pass next, travel with the ball, not go off the inside shoulder and even throw passes to the wrong player.
These are similar mistakes that happen during the course of a game. We really took the time to teach the concepts of eye contact, verbal communication, positive instructional feedback, accountability of details and most of all quickly recovering with an action plan. Teams need to practice failure over and over and over before they develop the correct coping mechanisms as a team. If they can not develop the correct coping mechanisms they will fail at completing the task as a team. When they do complete the task correctly it can be related to overcoming a 10 point deficit or even holding off other teams late run trying to get back into the game.
3.) Team Building Exhaustion Drills
The drills are NOT as important as the message. Any type of drill where the players can see one another faces is perfect. Anything from wall sits, to the "dying roach", linking with basketballs or non stop pushups will do the job.
Everyone must complete each exercise together. All for one, one for all. Anyone falls we all start over.
We ended the workout this way and talked about the "blood, sweat and tears" off the court. The long bus rides down I-75 after a loss. The buzzer beaters where we storm the court. The half time blues. Seeing each other on a daily basis in school. Saturday morning practices. Friday night home games.
What a day!!!!!!!
