I did some of my team building activities with my high school kids today. In the J.O. teams, it's important to do because you frequently have a lot of kids that haven't played together a lot. For the high school situation, I found that in a lot of ways it's more for me than it is for them.
I haven't totally figured out all of the personalities yet, so this gave me a chance to see how they interact. The activities were the typical range of stuff from trust falls, cooperation exercises and emotionally challenging stuff. It's fun that I actually learned something from all of the crap we did for resident assistant training in college.
Did the activities deepen the bonds between the kids? Yes, I think it did. It also established a lot of trust between them and me, the outsider coming in to change everything. That's certainly worth it.
So after one official practice and team building, I'm cautiously optimistic. Unfortunately our schedule is not very strong, but we've got two scrimmages against bigger schools and of course we'll have to get our game on when the tournament starts.
Who knew I'd have fun coaching high school?
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