Forming connections
Socialisation is a key part of training. Here’s how to embed opportunities to connect in your session.
Socialisation is a key part of sport and plays a huge role in the retention of players. For women and girls this is especially true.
I often include social activities at training to give players chance to connect with each other. Time spent bonding, laughing and engaging with teammates is just as important as developing handling or tackle skills.
Giving teammates a chance to connect can play a large part in the recruitment and retention of players. You can place connection tasks at the start of training, during drink breaks and to finish the session. By weaving connection throughout your training, it becomes a natural part of the session.
Here’s a few ways to put connection activities in your training session:
Rock Paper Scissors
If there’s a large group of new players. I like to ask them to play rock, paper, scissors with as many people as possible (coaches included). The person that loses has to say a fact about themselves that the other player didn’t know. If you’ve got a group that know each other well, you could challenge them to share interesting facts or just something they’re thinking or feeling that day.
Connection when they arrive
You can also challenge your team to come up with a greeting, tradition or handshake they must do when someone arrives at training. This could be a team handshake that they invent. It could also be a specific way of checking in with a teammate. Try co-creating this with the players so that it feels natural to them each week. That way no one arrives at training without being greeted by their teammates.
Bingo
Draw up a bingo board (you can use a whiteboard or print off sheets of paper if doing the activity at an indoor session). Fill the board with different characteristics such as: has blue eyes, has a cat, is a sibling. Players must ask different players facts to be the first one to fill on their bingo board.
Most interesting fact
This is a quick task you can set during a drink break, especially if you’ve split your group into two teams. Ask each team to think of the most interesting fact they know. At the end of the drink break, each team presents their fact to you. The team with the most interesting fact restarts the game with the ball.
Sharing praise
I use this one alot. I’ll ask people to get into pairs and give their partner some praise. It must be something they’ve done well at training. You can include this partway through training or at the end. You can also ask them to partner with someone they don’t usually speak to or partner with someone from the opposite team.
Sharing gratitude
I’ve used this task at the end of a session. I often ask players to form a circle and we each take it in turns to say something that we’re grateful for this week. You can also ask players to form a circle and everyone says something positive about the person to their left. As we go round the circle, it means everyone gets to hear some positive feedback about themselves.
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One of the things you always did to support connections was let us talk. There were many sessions where someone would turn up after a really bad day or feeling emotional after something that happened and they would start telling some of the team about it, and you just let it happen. You never got frustrated (or you never showed it at least) that we should have started the session already or that we were supposed to have moved on to the next task or that we had thrown your plan totally out of the window, you just let us talk. You recognised what that person and the team needed in that moment and you let it happen.
Knowing you, I can imagine you were constantly re-planning stuff in your head for when we all came back together and thinking and then re-thinking, but we never saw that. We never felt under time pressure or any pressure, we were just able to be there for the situation, and when we did come back to the session we were all better connected for it.
All the tips you put in the article are great, and we did these many times, but the best one was you allowed the team to bond in the way the team wanted to bond and that created an amazing team. All brought together by an amazing coach.