The Importance of Teamwork
By: Kate Ford
In a month focused on love and care, the Soccer Buddies team would like to highlight TEAMWORK which is an important aspect of any relationship!
Our society is hyper competitive - best car, best grades, best house, won the most games… the list goes on and on. The current focus is often on a winner-takes-all mentality which ultimately can be detrimental to overall community goals.
Life, however, is MORE than competition! With the focus on cooperation and team, “youth are better at working with others, overcoming adversity, thriving, and innovating.”
Team building activities are also crucial for important developmental milestones. Team activities (like our Soccer Buddies classes!) help children learn how to work together toward a common goal or solution. It is instrumental to developing skills in a variety of areas including: Problem Solving, Listening Skills, Communication, Cooperation, Self Esteem, Creative Thinking, and Leadership.
Learning these skills at a young age helps to set up your little for future success! After all, the majority of your child’s life will be spent working as a team in some capacity from personal relationships to their future workplace.
At Soccer Buddies, we work to embrace collaboration and support for your peers in classes that focus less on competition and more on skill-building and affirming children’s confidence.
Team Building Skills as seen in our Soccer Buddies Program!
Koalas (15months – 3): These little littles are able to learn a lot more skills than you think! During class, we start this age group with working together to color sort squishy balls and have them take turns with easy obstacle courses or helping with the rainbow parachute.
Bears (Preschoolers 3-4): As your child starts to grow and interact more with their peers at preschool or daycare, we work on games such as Freeze Tag and Sleeping Dinosaur where everyone must work together to unfreeze their friends or steal away all the balls from the “sleeping dinosaur” (aka their favorite coach).
Polar Bears (School Age 4-12): Our Polar Bears are usually participating in organized sports, gym, class projects, music/band, and volunteer days at school. To keep building on all these team based activities, we focus on scrimmaging at the end of every class. Playing an actual game of soccer pushes kids that might just be meeting each other for the first time to work as a team to defend their goal and score some points!
