Dallas Ice Jets

“To be successful at any level of sport, you have to have players who respect each other and are willing to make personal sacrifices for the good of the team and for their own personal growth.”

The importance of team chemistry
The Ice Jets Hockey Association believes that team chemistry is absolutely critical to building champion athletes and championship teams. We strongly believe in the positive results of effective team building. The Association's team-building program gives our players strategies and solutions for building unity, teamwork, trust, honesty, accountability, communication, and much more.

Effective team building goes beyond the teaching of sport skills and positioning of players on the ice. It relies on the skillful blending of several individual dreams and fears into a collective cohesive unit focused on a common goal. Our coaches work with our student-athletes to provide them with ideas and strategies they can use during challenging times of the season. Team building is an ongoing process that is affected by a multitude of internal and external factors. Injuries, parents, roommates, playing time, homesickness and poor grades all have the potential to upset an athlete and a team’s cohesiveness.

The benefits of team building

1. Success: Effective team building helps teams achieve greater levels of success. It enhances a team’s success by maximizing athlete potential while minimizing internal problems. Team building increases players’ potential by focusing their efforts toward achieving common goals. Unified teams devote the majority of their time and energy productively pursuing their goals while ineffective teams spend a large portion of time dealing with conflict.
2. Satisfaction: Not only does a unified team increase a team’s odds of winning, but it makes the hockey experience more enjoyable for the players, who get a tremendous sense of satisfaction from close relationships they develop with teammates.

Team-building characteristics
The Ice Jets Hockey Association has these seven “C’s” of team-building characteristics:

• Common goal
• Commitment
• Communication
• Constructive Conflict
• Cohesiveness
• Credibility
• Caring.

Team-building strategies
One way to build teams and develop unity among our players and teams is by using team challenges and games. Team-building challenges and games allow players to actually experience the demands and rewards of being a successful team. Some of the activities focus on having a common goal, others on role playing, communication, problem-solving, conflict management, accountability, trust and many combinations of these skills. The activities often symbolize the demands and challenges that a team will face throughout the season, just compressed into a time frame anywhere from a minute to an hour. The activities and challenges help our coaches learn about each player, the team, who the leaders are, how players interact under pressure and how they individually and collectively handle obstacles and challenges. Additionally, players gain insights on the team as a whole as well as learn about themselves as part of the process.
 
One of the key areas for using team challenges and games with our student-athletes is not the activities themselves, but the processing of the team concepts generated by the games. While they are fun, the purpose is for players to learn something that will create a lasting impression. We believe it is also important to discuss what the players and team learned and gained from the activities and how the team plans to act on the insights throughout the season. After the completion of a team building activity, coaches take the time to evaluate its effectiveness with the team and whether it achieved the desired objective and if the team responded favorably.