6 easy team building games!

TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK

Handball is a team sport, and as such requires much more than decent handball players to succeed.

While all good handball teams feature great players, my experience is that the highest performing Handball teams, youth and senior, seem to display 'other' characteristics.

Ive tried to put my finger on exactly what these other qualities are, and my best review is as follows;

Its quite possible you can determine the difference between a good opponent and a great opponent before the match even begins. Do your players spend a lot of time during the warmup observing their opponents rather than actually warming up? This might be a sign. The great teams seem to display a particular type of energy the moment they step on the court to warm up. A mixture of being confident and self-assured. The warmup looks great and players are right in the moment. You wont catch great teams taking time out of their warmup to check out how its going on your side of the court.

Its hard to describe but if you know you know.

During the match great teams seem to display brilliant interpersonal relations - player roles & responsibilities appear to be clear and coherent, where the key performers on the court appear no more 'important' than the players on the bench. There is an atmosphere of positivity, where the bench-warmers seem highly active and supportive for those on-court. Every small success is celebrated by the entire group - an appreciation of everyones strengths. Errors seem to only be punished by words of encouragement from even the highest performers.

There are some opponents you face, where you know that if you can get a great start in the match you are likely to own the outcome. There are other opponents where you never feel comfortable. The great teams i've competed against seem highly versatile and cope well even when the game seems to be against them. This might be a consequence of extremely good goal-setting and problem solving strategies.

All good teams have good handball players who can score goals and win matches. But the great teams, they seem to have that 10% extra. It hard to know exactly what the 10% extra looks like, but I think you can fit it into four main components - goal setting, interpersonal relations, problem solving, and role clarification.

Though i'm not completely sure, i think the effectiveness of these four components can lead to a huge impact on cognitive, affective, process, and performance outcomes. Furthermore, research all over the world seems to suggest that team building has a positive effect across all team outcomes. In terms of specific outcomes, team building is most strongly related to affective and process outcomes.

What i'm trying to say is, training technique and tactics all you want. Over time you will for sure end up with a good Handball team. But if you want to be great, you've got to build a great team.

Here are 6 team-building activities that might start to develop some of the crucial interpersonal, problem solving, and role clarification characteristics of great teams.