When I make teams in practice how I do it will depend largely on the type of team I’m working with. When the team has a large disparity between the top players and the weaker ones, I try to balance the teams by putting the top players with the weakest ones and then work my way toward the middle. But when the team is fairly close in ability level I like to come up with a method that randomly selects the players.
I use a couple different methods in my practice last week. We were going to play 2v2 so I had the players line up in order of their birthday and paired the first and second, third and fourth and so on. Next, I had the players create two teams and then number themselves off. Then I matched the players up from each team with the one’s together, two’s together, etc. Lastly, we put them in order by jersey number and paired them off.
My favorite method was the one we used to create teams for the scrimmage. The players with middle names that began with A to M were on one team and N to Z were on the other. This was fun because most of the players didn’t know each other’s middle names so they got to know each other better, creating a got team building opportunity. During the scrimmage they called each other by their middle name. They talked more during this scrimmage than any other this season.
The different methods for creating teams fostered a fun environment that brought out the best in the players. They were enjoying themselves so they invested a lot of energy into the session.
Share your ideas for creating teams in practice by leaving a comment on this post.
