Team Building Exercises
From the terrific book: Catch Them Being Good

by Tony Dicicco, Colleen Hacker, Charles Salzberg

Tight Rope

Objective: To learn to pull your own weight.
Requires cooperation, give and take, intuiting needs for greater or lesser exertion of force, initiative and leadership.

Equipment: a strong rope approximately 1/2" to 1” in diameter.

Numbers: 2 teams ranging from 8-26

The Game:

Two teams or groups line up facing each other. Each team must designate a captain who is to be the only one who can speak for the group. Each team should line up and then sit down on the ground facing each other. The coach then places a strong rope in a straight line between them.

            Each person on both teams is asked to place two hands firmly on the rope with palms facing down to the ground. Hands should be placed on the rope in an alternating fashion so that the partner across the rope should have one hand (palm down) in between her partner’s hands. The sequence is my left hand, partner’s right, then my right and my partner’s left…continues all the way down the line.

            The object is to have 2 equal groups on each side of the rope pull equally on both sides in order to pull themselves up off the ground in one perfectly even motion at the exact same time.

            Each captain will give the instructions to her group and will count one, two, three. On three, all players should exert the requisite force to allow the group to move up to a standing position at the exact same time. Now, repeat this sequence two more times for a total of three ups and downs.

Variation: have each team (split in half) try it first, then the entire squad together.

Debriefing:

• What made this difficult?

• What contributed to team success?

• How important is communication to team success?

• Does just one person’s performance impact the team’s success? If so, how?

• What happens when a group of players or one person tries to do more (or less) than the others?

• What is the relationship, role and responsibility of individual players to the team?

• How can this exercise help team performance in the future?

  Web Administrator    Ken Gamble