The Truth About Team Dinners and Building Real Chemistry

Team dinners feel like connection. But proximity is not the same as trust. Learn systems that build a championship culture. Get the free training for coaches here → coachfreetraining.com 

👋🏼 I'm Coach Bre - a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a long-time head volleyball coach and 4-time state champion.

In this episode, I'm breaking down why teams that look connected in September fall apart in November - and the exact method I use to build the kind of chemistry that holds up under pressure.

Here's what you'll learn:
✅ Why fun team activities create proximity, not trust
✅ The 3 pillars of real team chemistry (vulnerability, trust, psychological safety)
✅ Google's research on what actually makes teams perform at their highest level
✅ How to run the Open Circle method - a 15-minute weekly meeting that changes everything
✅ The mistake I made last season by skipping it (and what happened) 

🎯 The teams that stay connected when things get hard aren't the ones who ate the most pasta together. They're the ones who built psychological safety on purpose. 

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction
00:17 Proximity vs. Chemistry
02:35 Why Surface-Level Connection Fails
04:25 Three Keys to Real Chemistry
06:07 The Open Circle Method
08:18 How to Run Open Circles
09:49 Lessons Learned
10:30 Recap & Call to Action 

💬 Comment below: What's your current go-to team building activity? I want to know what's working (and what's not) for coaches right now! 

📩 Work with Coach Bre: coachfreetraining.com

📌 Free Tools & Next Steps
🔹 Grab our in-depth FREE training → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach
🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame
🔹 Championship Program Membership: champions.elitecompetitor.com
🔹 Player Impact Plan: https://elitecompetitor.kit.com/6639eaaf9f 

🔔 Subscribe for more for weekly coaching tools, mental game systems, and team culture strategies for coaches of girl athletes.

P.S. A few stats worth knowing:
⚡️ Psychological safety - not talent, not leadership - was the #1 factor in high-performing teams, according to Google's Project Aristotle. (Google, 2016)
⚡️ Teams with high psychological safety are 35% more likely to report high performance. (McKinsey & Company, based on Project Aristotle findings)
⚡️ Athletes who feel a strong sense of team belonging perform significantly better under pressure than those who feel socially isolated on their team. (Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, Eys et al., 2015) 

The Coach Her Game YouTube channel is hosted by The Elite Competitor and is dedicated to helping coaches of girl athletes strengthen their mental game and team culture in order to develop a competitive edge. 

#teamchemistry #coachinggirls #mentalperformance #highschoolcoach #teamculture

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

Transcript

1:04

Coach, what I'm about to say, might sing a little. Team dinners are not creating the chemistry that you think they are. And if that hurt, I totally get it, because team dinners might be your go-to tool to build chemistry and you're gonna defend them with everything that you have. But here's the truth, proximity. Doesn't automatically create chemistry and stay with me for this video because what you're about to learn will completely change how you think about this. And if I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bree. I'm a 14 year head volleyball coach, four times state champion coach, and the co-founder of the Elite competitor where I help coaches build championship programs that they are proud of. And no, I am not anti I-Team dinner, but I am gonna tell you something that is either gonna make you really uncomfortable or make you say finally someone said it. Team dinners are not the problem. Like I said, I still do them every week. My team loves them. I love them. But here's what I said on TikTok and what I am telling you right now. Eating pasta together is not. And should not be your only team building strategy. It is a team activity and there is a difference, a big one. Today. I'm gonna break down what's actually missing and why teams that look connected in September, eating pasta together, fall apart in November, and the exact method that I use to build real chemistry with my athletes. The kind of pressure or the kind of tools that help them. Stay connected under pressure. So let's get into this. As I mentioned, I posted this TikTok not too long ago, super casual, just sharing what I just shared with you. And within a few hours the comments were jumping, uh, coaches were defending their team dinners. Like I had personally insulted their grandma's lasagna recipe, which for the record, I would never okay. But what I notice is that most of the coaches that pushed back the hardest, they all said the same thing. Our team dinners have brought us so close, and I believe them. I genuinely do. Here's the thing though, shared meals, escape rooms, paint nights, all of it. Those are all proximity experiences. Now, there's a little bit that maybe goes into some of the other more like experiences that you have to do something challenging with somebody else, but you're physically together for teen dinners. You're having fun and fun matters, but proximity is not the same as trust. And trust is where chemistry actually lives. And maybe some of you have actually recognized that team dinners are making things worse because they're reinforcing some of the cliques that already exist on your program. It's like they go to eat a meal together and then they're just sitting with the people that they wanna sit with and excluding other people. Okay, so why? Proximity is not enough. Think about it this way. You can sit next to someone in a room or on a bus for three hours and still not know a single thing about them. You can share a meal twice a week for an entire season and never once talk about anything that actually matters. You can do all the team bonding activities in the world, and I've done them all, trust me, and still walk into the championship feeling like you've got 12 individuals wearing. Same jersey instead of a team Surface level connection doesn't hold up under pressure. When the score is tied and your best player just made a critical error and the energy in the gym drops, that's where chemistry gets tested and chemistry isn't built on fun nights out. Although it can help, it's not gonna show up for you in those moments. The teams that stick together when things get hard, those were the teams and those are the teams that have learned to be vulnerable with each other, not just comfortable, vulnerable. And that doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen over breadsticks, although it could. It usually happens through con, consistent and intentional practices. All right, and here's the thing. That's exactly what we go deep into inside our championship program mentorship, because the team drama, the disconnection, the athletes who don't trust each other under pressure, that stuff kills seasons and it's actually a simpler fix than most coaches think. I'm gonna walk you through the method right now, and if you want the actual. Done for you template for this, how to actually build chemistry on your team without just relying on team dinners. I'll tell you how to get the mentorship at the end of this video, including the template that I explained in a second. But first, lemme tell you what actually works. Three things to build real chemistry on your team. Okay? Number one, vulnerability. Not we all cried together. Real vulnerability, like knowing your teammate's fears, knowing what she's carrying outside of the gym, knowing if she's had a bad game, you're not gonna let her spiral alone. That kind of knowing that doesn't happen with intentional space for it. So vulnerability is number one. Number two, trust. And here's the thing about trust. It's not built through good times. It's built through hard conversations and kept promises, and the experience of being by someone who is struggling and you know they're not being judged for it. You can't manufacture that through a team dinner, although the thing I'm gonna talk about can help with that and it can show up in team dinners. Now you can create these conditions. It does require. Intention though. Number three, psychological safety. This is a big one. That's what the vulnerability and the trust create. So research from Google. Yeah. Google spent millions studying what makes teams perform at their highest level, and the number one factor was not talent. It was not leadership. It was psychological safety. The belief that you can speak up, you can make a mistake, you can share something real and not be punished for it. Coaches, if your athletes don't feel psychologically safe on your team, they are not going to play free. They are going to play scared and no amount of team pasta nights is going to fix that. Right. So I'm curious if you wanna drop below, what is your current team building routine? Do you do something to build this trust, vulnerability, psychological safety? I would love to hear it before or, uh, before I go into what I'm about to share, which is what I do. So what do we do instead? Let me introduce you to something called the Open Circle method. This is something that I've been doing with my teams for a handful of years and. It's one of the most powerful tools I have as a coach, and it's gonna sound very simple. Okay. I love those things that are like simple but big impact. So here's what we do. Once a week we do an open circle meeting. It's a team meeting, 15 minutes. That's it. Specifically designed to create space for some open, honest sharing among your athletes. It's not a lecture from you, it's not a speech. It's where our athletes are literally sitting in a circle on the same level, looking at each other, and they actually talk to each other. Okay? And here's why this works. Most coaches are hoping that their athletes are gonna figure out how to connect. They hope that the locker room conversations lead to something meaningful. They hope that the team dinner situation loosens things up enough, but hoping is not a strategy. The open circle gives your athletes a system for connection. Structured questions, a safe container. If there's a start, there's a finish. The consistency of showing up to it every single week, all season long. Now I know what some of you are thinking, like my athletes are gonna think, this is so corny. We're gonna sit down in a circle and share our feelings with each other. Okay? Well, I promise you the first time, yes, there might be some awkwardness to it. Um, someone will give a one word answer. Someone will. Stare around and get distracted, and that's fine. You just be consistent and you push through it. Um, because by week three, you will not believe what other athletes are willing to share with each other. The kid who has never said anything in a real team setting will say something that makes the whole circle be like, oh, hey, wow. That's also what I'm experiencing. And in that moment, chemistry is built because vulnerability and trust are built in those moments too. Okay, so the open circle method works because vulnerability is contagious. So when one athlete shares something real, it gives permission for the next person to do the same. And over the course of the season, you'll end up with a team that genuinely knows each other, not just as players, but as people. And that's what people are hoping that their team will accomplish through team dinners, which doesn't always happen because there's not actually like a container for them to do that. But once you build this into a weekly meeting, they can then go off to a team dinner and they actually have the foundation to be able to create some of this more organically too. Okay. And really how this works, um, I get my team together. I either rotate through a series of questions. If you're just starting out, I would start with some light questions that are like. Safe to answer simple things like, hey, uh, you know, everyone's gonna share a scar on their body and the story behind it. So I have like this scar right here by my eye and I'm gonna share the story behind it. And you gotta get a, you get a glimpse into like their past or their childhood, and then you can go deeper with some of those questions. I like to do roses and thorns, or, um, share something on your heart, something on your head. Um, so like something on your head is, what are you thinking about taking up your thoughts, something on your heart as something that you're, you know, more emotionally connected with? Um, if you wanna go really deep, um, hero hardship highlight is great. You could have a few athletes share each week, so they share somebody who's meaningful in their life. Something hard that they've been through and something that they're proud of or happy with that has happened to them. One thing about all of this is that you have to go first as a coach. You have to model this a modeling appropriate vulnerability so that they know what to share too. If you just share surface level things, um, then they will too. If you, and again, do not share. You know, share appropriate vulnerability, be appropriately vulnerable. Do not share your trauma and dump on them, but something that allows'em to open the door a little bit to share just a little bit more about what's going on in their life. Besides just the surface stuff. Like, I've got a lot of tests and you know, I'm feeling overwhelmed. You'll get a lot of that when you start, but the more that you stay consistent with this, the more that it will become what my players. Said at the end of the season, this is one of my favorite parts of the season, was our open circle sharing. Okay. Now I will say I got a little bit lax with it, um, last season, and it showed I thought my team was good and I'm like, you know, I'd rather spend that 15 minutes serving and passing and working on some skills. And, uh, that caused some problems for us because turns out there were some things that were bubbling under the surface when it came to drama, our connection, our trust, and I didn't stay consistent with these open circle meetings. I know it would've made a difference. I would have, all right, now as a recap, team dinners, I love'em. Don't, don't come at me. You can still have your team dinners, but also have ways that you're going to intentionally build moments of trust, connection, vulnerability with your athletes so that they can actually feel psychologically safe and those team dinners can be meaningful and not actually like reinforce clicks and things like that. Now, if you want my template for the Open Circle method, so the exact template that I give you on, here's how I run the meeting. Here are example questions. Here are the prompts that you can do. Um, that lives inside our membership called the Championship Program Mentorship. It's where high school coaches hang out to learn how to build championship programs. These are the systems that championship programs run on, not just hoping it, uh, you know, hoping things work out, winging it. You know, building things from scratch every year and wasting all of your time and energy to trial and erroring, um, pulling things from conferences that live in your notes app and you don't really have time to implement them. This is where coaches learn how to actually build a championship program. So every month I give you a new template similar to the template that I would give you for the open circle method that lives inside our membership. And then every month we hop on a live call together where we build your version of it so you know how it works with your actual program, with your actual athletes. The other cool thing is that we're in community together inside our app. So you can ask questions anytime. You can connect with the other coaches in there who are simply amazing. So that is all within our membership, and you can find details on how to join in the link below. I would love to coach you and work with you deeper inside our championship. Program mentorship. All right, coaches. It's great. I now your cha your challenge. It was great to be on with you. Your challenge is, let me know below, how are you going to incorporate more connection, trust, vulnerability, team chemistry activities on your team that aren't just team dinner. I would love to know below.