Facilitating/Coaching a Winning Team

Its that time of year again when the flowers have started to break ground, the days have begun to get longer and lacrosse season is in full swing. I have been coaching at River Dell Regional HS for the past 3 years and I have been loving every minute of it. Just recently, I completed a 1.5 hour workshop on Experiential Leadership aka Team Building with 50 of my players to get them psyched for the season. We started the event out with Tank which is a very simple activity in which you have teams of 2. One player is inside a circle blindfolded “The Tank” and one person is outside the circle “Tank Commander” who is not blindfolded. The object of the activity is for the Tank Commander to tell the Tank where the Grenades (throwables) are and for them to hit other Tanks in the circle before they are hit. It was amazing to see the outcome of this event and the commonalities it has with the actual game of lacrosse. As an icebreaker we actually were able to process it for over 20 minutes and the team really got a lot from the experience. We then moved on to Key Punch which is another classic Leadership Challenge in which I broke the team up into their position (Attack, Midfielders & Defense) This allowed them to continue to build relationships with guys that they will be working extremely close with during the next 2 months. Overall, the event was a success and their were many takeaways from the event. As a facilitator/coach I feel the our team has now taken themselves to the next level and ready to take on the best teams out there.