3 Low-Lift Team Bonding Ideas to Build Trust Fast

🔥 Want to build team trust without spending hours planning complicated activities? Discover 3 simple, low-lift team bonding exercises that instantly bring your athletes closer! Get more tips here → https://coachfreetraining.com
 
In this episode, I’m sharing my go-to team bonding strategies that make a real impact on your athletes’ connection and performance! These low-effort, high-reward activities are perfect for building trust, breaking cliques, and strengthening your team’s mental toughness. Whether you’re just starting the season or need a quick reset, these bonding activities will help your team grow stronger, together.
 
🎯 You’ll Learn:
✔️ How the “Question of the Day” promotes trust and connection 
✔️ The power of "Plug & Play Elite Mental Game" for training mental skills and building team chemistry 
✔️ A fun, leadership-building “Freshman Meal” activity 
 
🎙 I’m Coach Bre – a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a 4-time state champion head volleyball coach. I help coaches like you build mentally tough teams that trust each other and perform under pressure.
 
🕓 Key Moments
00:00 – Introduction: Low-Lift Team Bonding Ideas
02:00 – Question of the Day: Simple Yet Effective
05:00 – Mental Training with Plug & Play Elite Mental Game
08:00 – Freshman Meal: Building Leadership and Trust
11:00 – Conclusion: Culture and Trust Through Team Bonding
 
Coaches – comment below: What are your favorite team bonding activities?
 
📌 Want to coach the mental game with confidence?
🔹 Grab our FREE training for coaches → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Learn more about Plug & Play Elite Mental Game → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach

Head to coachfreetraining.com to grab our free training for coaches to quickly level-up your team's mental game!

Transcript

1:04

Hey coach, if you know you need to be doing team bonding with your team because they're not gonna bond themselves, but you're not sure where to start, this video is for you. I'm going over my three low lift, high reward team bonding activities that I love to do at the beginning of a season, or really anytime during the season to make sure you're building teams that trust one another. Let's get into it. Number one, very low lift. Question of the day. I know it sounds like way too simple to actually work, but it does. So how I love to do it is I come up with a question of the day. At the beginning of practice, I have my teams split up into groups. I actually have my leaders in charge of something called squad. So they're in charge of five to six people. Um, a little, a little group that they're like, they're in charge of for the season, and I have them answer the question the day, and it can be as surface level as. If you could eat any meal for the rest of your life, what would it be like? Super simple like that. And then it gets a little bit deeper, a little bit more interesting as we go. Some things like, uh, choose a scar on your body and tell the story behind it. Um, who's somebody that you look up to in your life, like, things like that. So they go from kind of surface level to deeper and deeper and deeper as the season goes on. And it's a great way just to build connection with players. I mix up the groups. They start in their squads. Sometimes I'll have'em share in different grouping scenarios so that we're breaking up clicks and it just allows them to. Share with one another, connect with one another. And especially if you coach a girl's team, this is super important because if they don't trust each other, they're not gonna play well with each other. And in order to trust each other, they have to know each other. So this is a very low lift way to do that without a lot of pressure. A lot of time, like everybody has five minutes to just plug in a question of the day. Okay. My other low lift is our plug and play Elite mental game for teams. So if you've been around our world, you know that we are experts in mental training. I'm a mental performance coach. I've also been a head volleyball coach for the past 14 years. I've won four state titles as a coach, and mental training really is my secret sauce, and it is the thing that I started implementing in my team about. Six seasons ago because we kept losing games that we quote shouldn't have because of mental errors. We would be up, we'd, you know, be two points away from winning the match and we'd lose the whole thing. And physically we were talented enough to, to do really well, but mentally we were not there. And I had to look at myself as the coach and realize like. Hmm, I should probably start training some of this. And what I found was that training, the mental side of the game wasn't actually just to give them mental skills. It also allowed my team to bond and connect with one another. And I went the harder route. I became a mental performance coach to teach these skills to my team. You don't have to do that. So we have a very simple program. It's called Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for Teams. You literally get your team together, press play three minute videos, all the way up to about 15 minute videos, depending on the week. They watch the video together. You have a short discussion question to throw out to the team after, and they get into either a group or a small group. Or share within their small team The answer to that, what's really cool is that these athletes, when they're sharing these things in groups about their experience, they're no longer alone because every athlete thinks that they're the only one to deal with pressure, to get mad at themselves after a mistake and not be able to come back and like they all think they're alone in that, when really they're not. Everybody experiences that, so when they share those things, they're now building trust with each other because they're being a little bit more vulnerable with each other and plug and play elite mental game. Just this container allows them to be able to do that. I carve out just 20 minutes a week to do that. And if you're like, oh, 20 minutes a week, that's kind of a lot. I'll tell you right now, you're probably spending more than that trying to get your players' heads back in the game. Coaching the emotional side of the game, like this actually frees you up as a coach and allows you to coach what you want to coach, which is the sport, rather than trying to like get them, you know, to believe themselves again and to shake it off like when they have the skills to be able to do that themselves. You're coaching that less or trying to coach that less, and you get to do more of what you want to do. It actually. Like freeze up your time more. So that's what we do. It's almost like a killing two birds with the one stone situation because they're getting mental skills and they're connecting with each other. So if you wanna learn more about how to do that, go to our free training. It's at coach free training.com. I break down the simple mental training skills that I do with my team every week. And then you can also learn about plug and play Elite mental game for teams and get a discount on the program. All right, number three, I love this. We do a freshman meal as soon as we form teams in the beginning of the season. So. Um, within the first couple of days we got teams formed and our upperclassmen, typically these squad leaders serve breakfast or lunch or dinner depending on like what we're doing that season, um, to the underclassmen. So they prepare it, they serve them, and it kind of reflects this leadership model that the higher you go in our program, the more leadership responsibility you have and the more responsibility you have to serve underclassmen. And so we also use this as an opportunity to share more about. Our team values and what the mission of our program is and what the expectations are. And it actually comes a lot better coming from the leaders than from you as a coach. So I do still, um, share at this team meal some things from my coach perspective, but honestly, I let my leaders. I prepare them ahead of time and they talk about the expectations of the program and, um, you know, what it means to be a river volleyball player. And it's a really special event to kind of welcome the incoming, um, class in and also the returners that aren't upperclassmen. And also an opportunity to give our leaders a voice and an opportunity to let them share about what our program is all about. All right, so those are my three like favorite team bonding activities, and these aren't just like one-off like trust fall things or ropes course or things like that. These are like actual things that move the needle when it comes to culture and trust in your program because athletes are learning about each other. They're being vulnerable with each other, your leaders are serving, like these are the type of things that culture is built on, not like these random little like fun excursions that happen through this. Season, but aren't things that actually like build the culture and the trust on your teams. So hopefully that is helpful. I would love to hear what you love to do in preseason below in the comments, or even just throughout your season for team bonding. What do you do? And if you wanna learn more about specifically how to do two things at once, build the mental game of your players while also allowing them to connect with each other. Head to our free training@coachfreetraining.com.