Building Team Camarderie: This is How We Do it

Camaraderie is the spirit of good fellowship. It’s the mutual trust and friendship that emerges among people who spend a lot of time together.

Championship teams have it. Winning coaches understand its importance.

Take Doc Rivers, head coach of the NBA Boston Celtics, for instance. Rivers goes so far as to require his basketball players to spend off-court time together by attending one another’s functions. He realizes the obvious: some players like to hang out with certain teammates, others don’t. He’s continually trying to identify cliques in the locker-room and keeps a sharp eye on his basketball players to prevent too selective of groups that will get in the way of building team camaraderie.

When I was the point guard for Iowa State, we would get together once a week, watch a show, cook some food, and spend that important time together developing our trust and building key relationships.

There is seldom conversation amongst teams about how to foster chemistry. However, it is important for the coaches and leaders to find creative ways to unite their team in off-court opportunities. I constantly find myself struggling with this as I lead our seasonal summer coaching staff during our busy basketball camp season.

As I travel from school to school, I am always judging two things:

1. the coaching staff’s level of fatigue
2. unique opportunities to share a team building experience together. One location it might mean going for an all staff walk around a beautiful pond on campus. One location might present the chance to get on court and hoop it up together. One location was extremely exciting, which I share below.

I had two sessions at Gallaudet University this past summer, one in June and the other in July. During the June session, I identified a neat ropes course on campus. I immediately got connected with the ropes instructor, Jean, and inquired if I the coaching staff and I could attempt to do the ropes course on our day off prior to beginning the July basketball camp. While I wanted to make it mandatory, the middle of July is when fatigue typically creeps up on many of the coaches. However, almost the entire staff participated. We were challenged, yet Jean was a tremendous teacher and really was able to pull some amazing thoughts from the group. Most importantly, we had a great time getting outside of our comfort zone, engaging with one another on a completely different level, and we will forever share wonderful memories from the experience.

Here are some pictures from our experience and a video of myself flying through the air on the ropes course. The smiles and laughs tell it all.

PGC ‘Team Fennelly’ at the ropes course: Jenny Logan, Tony Tatum, David White, Lyndsey Fennelly, Omari Whiltshire, Stephen Fennelly, and Brianne O’Rourke.

GET CREATIVE AND BUILD CAMARADERIE ON YOUR TEAM

It doesn’t need to be a ropes course, but it is important to be thinking about how you can create camaraderie on your basketball team and sustain it for the duration of the basketball season. The pre-season is a wonderful time to encourage this behavior and build the foundation for a successful basketball season.

What are you doing this pre-season to build the chemistry of your team as either a coach or player? I would love other ideas or suggestions for what takes place in the pre-season to build the camaraderie of championship-level teams.

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