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

by Tony Dicicco, Colleen Hacker, Charles Salzberg

Wolves and Sheep
 

Objective:
To reveal those players willing to take a risk and those who aren’t. This is an exercise you can use to get fit w/o making it a boring and painful experience. It’s also an opportunity to see how your players respond under pressure. What you hope for is that players will embrace both levels of opportunity: to get fit and to outfox their opponents.

Equipment: Cones or lines to designate a playing area. You will also need cones to designate the safety box.

Space: allow 5 yards/player. Ex: a 4v4 game – 40 yards long. Vary length and width to accommodate size, age and aerobic capacity of players.

Numbers: any

The Game:
Divide the group into two equal teams and give each team a name. At any two diagonal corners of the rectangular field, create two safety zones. These zones should be squares that use two of the playing field sidelines, with cones being placed to complete the square inside the playing area (5x5 yard space as starting point). Players from both teams jog, run, sprint or skip (your choice) around the inside of the playing area. After unpredictable intervals of time, yell out one team’s name.
At that point the team called out become “wolves” and try to chase all the members of the other team, who are now “sheep”, and tag as many as they can before the sheep can get safely inside the safety zones. The important point to remember is that the team you call will be the ones who will do the chasing. Once a player is tagged, he joins the other team. Players are safe if they can run to a safety zone without being tagged.
Make sure that you vary the order of the teams called to be the wolves in some unpredictable way. How quickly and how often you call a team name should be as random and variable as possible.
When all of one team has been captured by another team, the game ends.

Variation:
You can have players dribble a basketball, soccer ball, or run with a football while they are chasing and being chased. Use your imagination!
Add a third team (allows for more variation in selecting “wolves”)

Debriefing

• What did you learn about the relationship between risk taking and playing it safe and secure?
• How did it feel when you were chasing? Being chased? What do you think that difference means?
• How did skill and tactics factor into success, rather than sheer speed and quickness?
• What would you do differently next time?
• How does this exercise pertain to the championship game?

  Web Administrator    Ken Gamble