This Tip Could Save Your Team This Season

Lee MJ Elias [0:08 - 1:12]: Hello, hockey friends and families around the world. And welcome back to another edition of your favorite hockey podcast, our kids play hockey. It's Lee Elias and Mike Bonelli with you today. And we've got a topic here titled this tip could save your team for the season. This one actually came from Mike Bonelli's mind. It's a really good point at this point of the season when you're hearing this, keeping in mind it's just the start of September when we're recording this, although this is an important tip throughout the entire season for any team, are you doing team building right now? Are you doing the really important team building right now within your team to make sure that there's a cohesive bond, that trust is established, communication is established, accountability is established. It is so important to establish that now. And in our experience, Mike, a lot of the teams out there don't do this. They might think it's a pizza party. They might think all the kids are together. They're at practice. Maybe we have a team mill. In my experience, Mike, that's never quite enough, but I'm going to throw it to you here because I know you kind of have the right questions that I think a lot of coaches are going to ask in this situation and parents, and I'd love to discuss it with you. 

Mike Bonelli [1:12 - 2:00]: Well, again, in full disclosure, when I jump into these kind of scenarios and the groups that I work with, my go to resource is you. So, you know, and this is where, you know, the text messages will start, the phone call be like, oh, my God, I'm in this situation. And so I thought today, and I think I'm a lot like most coaches. I think, you know, I'm not an expert in team building. I believe in it. I think it needs to be done right. I see it when it's not working and I know it's not working, but I think it's more of how do I get, how do I get off the couch and create a team building opportunity with a couple of restraints that I think all of us have as youth hockey. Not all of us. Most of us have as youth hockey hockey coaches and probably why we have the barriers we do. 

Lee MJ Elias [2:00 - 2:00]: Right. Right. 

Mike Bonelli [2:01 - 2:12]: I have no budget for. I have no budget or team building. I really don't. I don't have any time. Like, I can't ask my parents to come to the rink again on a different night. 

Lee MJ Elias [2:12 - 2:13]: Right. 

Mike Bonelli [2:13 - 3:15]: And build team building. I don't have really a lot of help. Like, I put an email out, anybody want to help with team building? And just like when I asked for a little bit extra money for a tournament fee, I get crickets. Right. And then. And on everything else, I don't know if I can sacrifice team building for the fact that I need to work on my power playing penalty kill. And I think this is where a lot of us get a lot of anxiety about it. And I just want to ask you, as somebody who does this every day for every level, and we've mentioned this on the show a number of times, this could be done with six year olds and 26 year olds. And I believe it's such a huge and vital, important piece of what we do. And now is the time, the beginning of the year. Even if we've gone through a struggling first two, three weekends, I still think there's time to rewrite the strip ship and put us in a good situation for a better experience for our kids. 

Lee MJ Elias [3:15 - 4:28]: Right. And, look, there's a few places to start with that. Let me kind of dismiss some of the objections. Right. You don't need a ton of time to do this. Not as much. Realistically, 20 minutes a week with the team can accomplish this. All right. What you want now, look, I always say the more you can do, the better. But really, 20 minutes will do it. You can't do much less than that. Um, and again, it does depend on the age group. For example, like, if you're working with eight year olds, 20 minutes is pretty much their threshold. Anyway. Uh, when you get up to the older groups, you can go for an hour if you really want to. Um, so, uh, that's number 120 minutes a week can accomplish, Mike, what you're talking about, uh, especially at the start of the season, cost. Um, yeah, look, if you can't find a third party, and, again, I get a lot of work doing that, but I also try and help coaches that cannot do that. Right. You just need a point person that can run you through some of these drills and talks. And in my experience, most teams have somebody, usually it's a head coach, might be an assistant coach. Sometimes it can even be a parent. But you just need someone who's kind of comfortable talking about some of these topics and then running kids through some exercises that support the topics. So those are the two big, I think, objections that you mentioned. You don't need a lot of time. You don't need a lot of money. Right. You don't need a lot of resources to do this. 

Mike Bonelli [4:29 - 4:59]: And I think, from my experience dealing with you, it's the first opportunity, even if I only have 20 minutes to kind of test the water and see if it is something that's viable for me. Nobody's asking you to do a weekend getaway with your team up in the mountains. That doesn't need to happen. But what can I do in a very small timeframe that's really impactful that, that I can just, you know, kind of steal from you? Like, what are some of the things I can do? 

Lee MJ Elias [4:59 - 5:00]: I'll give them a. 

Mike Bonelli [5:00 - 5:16]: And you can get big, right? You could get big with this. Yeah. I mean, I've seen some of the stuff you've done with, like the puerto rican national team and, you know, obviously some of the stuff you've done with, you know, some of the premier college programs and youth programs. But again, this is more. I got my, I have my, you know, twelve U team. 

Lee MJ Elias [5:17 - 5:17]: Yeah. 

Mike Bonelli [5:17 - 5:24]: I don't think they're all connected. Like kids really don't know each other. The parents really know each other. You know, what can I do just to get myself started? 

Lee MJ Elias [5:24 - 6:27]: Yeah, it's a funny point you bring up because while I do enjoy working with the high level teams and some of the older players, I really love working with younger age groups because there's no nice way of saying this. These kids don't have a lot of mental baggage, if you know what I mean by that. Like, they're young. Right. And hockey's still this wonderful environment that they play in. And yet, look, I'll give you a few examples and takeaways and please, everybody listening, take these and do them. I want you to do them because it helps develop these, these kids into young adults and, and good members of society. So typically, the way, Mike, the way I set this up, and I'll go through the examples here, is I will make sure that we stay for 20 minutes after a practice. All right. I get very little pushback from the parents on that because I think everybody's really got 20 minutes. Every once in a while I'll run into, well, you know, this kid's got another practice with another sport or, you know, we got to get home for dinner. And this is what's funny, Mike. Nine out of ten times they stick around. They say, I only got a few minutes, and then they end up coming every week because they see the value in what we're doing. Go ahead. 

Mike Bonelli [6:27 - 6:31]: I was going to say, but don't schedule that on Monday morning. You're doing it Monday night. 

Lee MJ Elias [6:31 - 6:32]: Yeah. No, 100%. 

Mike Bonelli [6:33 - 6:35]: You're going to get your 20 minutes by scheduling it, right? 

Lee MJ Elias [6:35 - 9:54]: No, no. And again, what they do is we use team snap. Our team managers actually put it in the team snap. It's practice and team building right after. So it's. And they ask, are you coming? Are you doing this? Because they see the value in it. But look, the starting point really, for every team I work with is the same. And this is the stuff that I want coaches and teams to take. The most important, fundamental aspect of team building is trust. Trust. If your team does not trust each other, it's not going to work. All right? And it's. It's a lot more delicate than people think. And again, everyone has their own individual definition of that word, and they can vary a little bit. So you got to define that word for the team. Now, how do you do this in 20 minutes? It's real simple. You sit the kids down and you ask them, what does trust mean to you. Let them discuss it for a minute. They will talk. You just got to encourage them a little bit. And you'll usually get answers like, I've got your back, or you'll get answers like, I'm going to do what the coach tells me to do. And these, these are all good definitions. And then you can explain that. Well, they're different definitions. You all have slightly different definitions. Then what you do is you define what trust means for the team and coaches parents. This is where you can get a little creative. I always use one. That's my go to. In fact, my kids teams are using this this year. The coach took this from me without even asking, which I thought was pretty funny. But I always say that we have a priority system on this team, which is team, teammates, self. That is the order in which you prioritize. The team comes first, then your teammates than yourself. And the trust is that we're all committing to that prioritization system. We established that day one or as early as possible in the season. So now everyone, Mike, this is just a talking point. Everyone has that understanding of that's where we're going together right now. To your point, you could say, was that team building? Yes. The team building I do is split up into five minutes of talking, like me talking to the team. And then I always do some sort of physical challenge to reinforce the trust thing so you could go as simple as trust falls. I mean, a lot of people do that, but there's a lot of other things you can do. I told you, I've done things with paper plates where I put the paper plates on the floor and I have one kid blindfolded or I have one kid just not look down. You have to look at their partner, and they have to navigate through the plates without stepping on the plates. Now we're talking about, you have to trust your teammate, you have to trust each other. And I can go much deeper into that drill. I'm not going to like, if you want to, just email us at team at kidsplay hockey.com and I will send it to you, because I have this written out, but 20 minutes is all it takes. I've also done a fun one, Mike. Um, I did this with the puerto rican national team. You actually talked about this? I wanted to do a team building exercise where our national team members, which are men and women, these are collegiate or professional players, could do something with our youngest kids that 6789 year olds. So I put hula hoops down on the ground, about ten of them, like in a pathway. And you have to jump into each hula hoop along the way and meet in the middle, and you play rock, paper, scissors, shoot, and the winner continues to move. And the idea is you want to move all the way to the other person's hula hoop and you win the game. And it was great because everyone can play that game. There's no competitive advantage when you're 25 or five in that game, right. But these all take very little time. They take almost no money. If you don't have the money for Hulu, use the players gloves. You have all the resources you need right there with you. 

Mike Bonelli [9:54 - 10:16]: All these opportunities we have. Obviously, you're talking about basically being in a room in the rink, maybe in your locker room, you know, just in a. Maybe an open space that a lot of our, you know, common, you know, common space that ranks have. But this is really, really where, you know, you're hitting on the points, right? They're. They're really paper plates. There's no cost to that. Uh, there's no cost to. All of us have hula hoops around. 

Lee MJ Elias [10:16 - 10:35]: Or at least, I'm going to say it again, Mike. Just. Just interrupt you, sir. A lot of times, I'll. If. Like, I. If I. I usually have my plates with me, but, like, you can use gloves, you can use equipment. Like, there are obstacles, right? You can use cones. Like, you have everything you need in the locker room or in the rink. You know, I just always like to say that you don't need a ton to do this stuff. 

Mike Bonelli [10:35 - 11:11]: Well, I think one of the key points, too, is that. And what I really, you know, want to hit on at some point is that. That you. The reason you're bringing this up at a. In a low cost, you know, low impact way, is that this should be, and it has to be a priority in being the first step in team building. And I just want everybody as listening and especially coaches and managers, that you need to put this on your schedule just like you would if you were going to do special teams practice. 

Lee MJ Elias [11:11 - 11:12]: Right? Right. 

Mike Bonelli [11:12 - 11:19]: And how important is that? I mean, how so to your, in your experience for the average team? 

Lee MJ Elias [11:19 - 11:20]: Right. 

Mike Bonelli [11:20 - 11:27]: What are we looking at? How many 20 minutes after practice sessions do we want to try to schedule? 

Lee MJ Elias [11:27 - 15:21]: Yeah, that's a fair point. Look, I think you want to go top heavy at the beginning of the season. I think one a month on average should be the bare minimum, just to answer your question. But I think you gotta read the pulse of your team. Right. I think that the first few weeks of the season, whether your kids know each other or not, you got that first few weeks of the season kind of stuff going on. So it's kind of a re acclimation. Get to know everybody's name, get them working together off the ice again. Look, you gotta remember, for the kids on the ice, they're getting instruction, but they wanna do what the coach is telling them to do. And we're always telling the kids, we want you to be creative. We want you to think we want you to trust each other. Well, you gotta build that into the plan. Right. Because on the ice, they're trying to impress you a little bit. Right. Or trying to do what they do well. So the stuff off the ice, Mike, at the beginning of the season, is that cohesive team building that allows you to know the other people, to work together towards a common goal. You know, these are the things that kind of separate in a game. Again, I look at it a lot like muscle memory. Right. You know, these kids need to learn the muscle memory for their shot, their passes, their rebounds, certain plays in the game, obviously for goaltenders, that reactionary kind of muscle memory team building has a similar effect when they've worked together six, seven times. By the end of the first month, you are going to be light years ahead of the other teams that are not doing this. And I have seen this firsthand so many times. There's so many examples of a bonded team in October or November is winning games on pure love for each other or the ability to work together where some other teams are just still trying to get into that space. Um, a lot of times, again, you'll see teams bond that get a tournament. Right. You'll get those big tournaments and everybody start to love each other. You don't have to wait for that. And those are expensive, too. So, again, to answer your question, a minimum of once a month would be my suggestion. I think the pain points of a season are the first month. I would do it every week if you can. I mean that. I think when you get to the holidays, which can be really hard, you got to gauge where your team's at. Sometimes I do less, sometimes I do more. I think every team has a lull at some point, and typically it's right after that Christmas, Annika, new year time period, because there's so much going on. The parents are exhausted, the kids are exhausted, the coaches are exhausted. It's not crazy to think that when you come back on January 2, you're going to be in a little bit of a different mood. Right? So that's a good time to do team building. And then I think the third most important time. And this is where, again, a lot of teams make mistakes. Oh, we'll do it right before our playoff game. You should be doing it for two, three, four weeks before the postseason. To build that bond, you got to time it. But you don't want to go into the playoffs hoping for a bond. You want to go into the playoffs bonded. All right? And again, this is where you see those massive upsets happen sometimes, Mike, where a team will come in and they just, they. They really care about each other. Everyone's flowing, and they'll beat a team that's been at the top all season because that team has not done any of this stuff. Right. So last thing I'll say on this, I think this is an important kind of segue. You might have questions on this, too. Wherever your team is, if you are an elite team that you think you're going to go undefeated this season, or you're all the way at the other end of that thinking, we're going to really struggle this season. It's important to do it for both because this is nothing to do with your skill on the ice. This has everything to do with making sure the kids can work together in a cohesive unit. And I don't care what team sport you play. You need that to be successful. I have never been on a team, Mike, or coached a team that has been successful where the kids all hated each other. It's never happened. All right? I've only been on teams where there was some understanding of this team bond. They don't always have to like each other, but there's a mutual respect there that every championship or winning team I've worked with has had. And you can develop that, right. 

Mike Bonelli [15:21 - 15:46]: And I think anybody that's been a part of a, you know, a successful venture would know that, too. Like, it's usually you're, you're, you know, there's a, there's a reason why the saying, you know, you're only as strong as your weakest link exists, because it's just true. Another question I had for you on team building, does it have to look like hockey? Like, does it have to relate to hockey? Do you have to be in the locker room and be like, hey, we're going to go over team building, and this is how it relates to a hockey player. 

Lee MJ Elias [15:46 - 15:46]: Right. 

Mike Bonelli [15:46 - 15:53]: I mean, what, what are some of the things we can do as coaches and parents to, you know, kind of just understand it doesn't, doesn't have to look like hockey at all? Actually. 

Lee MJ Elias [15:54 - 19:44]: Yeah. I think what I, what I end up doing is there's probably a lot of hockey metaphors when I do these things, but it's nothing to do with, with the actual skill sets of hockey for the most part. And again, kind of going back to something you had asked before about, like, where do you do this? Like, locker room, if it's warm enough outside, I almost always take them outside. Um, so, so if it's, if it's above, I'll just say 45 degrees fahrenheit. Uh, and the weather is okay, we're probably going to go outside. Uh, there's less distractions out there. I get more space out there. Um, when you get to kind of the, the really cold months of winter. Um, yeah, most rinks have a place inside that I go to. The locker room is actually my last place that I try and do it. I just try and find open area in the arena. Um, sometimes I like doing it around the other parents and the other, the other people, because then the kids know that they're watching as well and they can see the value of it. Um, but no, it has little to do with hockey. Now, I might throw in an exercise to work on, like an off ice plyometric skill set that I want them to do, but I won't focus it on, hey, we're doing plyometrics. It's like we're doing sprints or doing quick turns as part of the game, the, the big part of the physical activity. And I just want to remind you and everybody listening, it's always, there's a talk, five minute talk about what's the goal today. Why are we working on this today? You can't miss that. The team building exercises are really fun. They have a lot of value, but you can reinforce the actual physical challenges with, hey. The goal today is communication. The goal today is accountability. The goal today is you don't win the game unless your whole team finishes. Those messages are really important. Are those hockey messages? I think they're pretty universal messages. I think we actually use them in hockey, not the other way around, but the physical challenge. I want them smiling, I want them having fun, and I want them competing. Like another one. I'll drop a bunch of these. I have one where I put five cones or five gloves, probably ten yards apart, each one of them, and I'll do something either where, you know, someone has to run to the fifth one and back the fourth one and back the third one back, or I'll put balls on top of the cones, and you got to go find a way to. What's it called? Challengely put them in a certain order to win the game. So there's some thinking. Another one of my favorite ones that I do a lot is tic tac toe. And just so people know how cheap this can be or affordable, all you need is four hockey sticks to make a tic tac toe board, right. You cross hatch them, and you got a tic tac toe board. And then you need whatever sandbags, whatever you want them running with. Could be pucks, but you need an x and an o, right. And what I love about this drill is I'll put them 40 yards away or less, whatever. Whatever space you have, and you have to run. And the way I do it is I put the X's and the O's halfway to the board. So they have to run, pick up the x, go to the board, and put it down. And on the way back, they have to pick up an x and give it to their teammate. Now, what starts to happen, Mike? And this is why I love this. Tic tac toe is not fair when you're running because you can get a turn ahead of the other team or what happens almost all the time. Speaking of accountability, someone forgets to pick up the x or the o on the way back, and that's how the other team gets ahead. And then to build on top of that, if you're not paying attention, there's a lot going on. This isn't like you're sitting there with a pencil. If you're not paying attention, you'll just run down and throw an extra no down on the board without thinking, like, you got to think, you got to be watching from down there. The team's got to talk. Someone's got to be in the kid's ear of, like, listen, go top, right? Because they're going to do this, and suddenly you've created hockey out of tic tac toe. I got them critically thinking. I got them talking. There's got to be trust. There's physical activity, there's strategy, and they're competing against another team. And what I love about these drills, Mike, and this is something every coach wants to hear will finish. And I always hear, do it again. We got to play again. Right. 

Mike Bonelli [19:44 - 19:46]: Your 20 minutes is up. Sorry, guys. 

Lee MJ Elias [19:46 - 19:51]: Yeah, and the parents actually look at me sometimes. I have to look at the parents that you want. You guys want one more? 

Mike Bonelli [19:51 - 20:41]: And they love it. Well, no, there's no doubt they love it, too. And I think, you know, I've done. We've done tic tac toe last year with helmets and gloves. And I think it just, you know, your kids bring out their own helmets, their own gloves, and you make it. You make it work. Let me. Let me just pull the thread on that a little bit, too, about how important it is to design team building activities or something you're going to have in your team, that the result you want to get out of it, you can manipulate, especially with the youngest kids. Right. You don't want. You don't want the team building activity to turn into failure. You've got to create an atmosphere for success. So maybe talk a little bit about how do you manipulate that. Like, how do you look at your team and go, okay, yes, it's a team building event, but these are seven year olds. They're not smart. Like, I'm going to make it. I'm going to make it where I get the result I want out of it and influence the team building piece that I need. 

Lee MJ Elias [20:41 - 25:51]: Right. Well, there's a few ways. Right? Like, so I'll kind of continue and I'll even tell you another drill, like, when I do tic tac toe or connect four. Um, one of the things I like about that is that they're moving and they're thinking, and these are. These are skill sets of the younger ages. We don't always get, um, a lot of times in hockey, especially at the younger ages, and I've talked about this with a lot of parents, because on the ice, you're generally, at minimum, drifting. You're moving. Kids think they're moving and they're not. Right. They're just flat footed and drifting down the ice. So what I love about tic tac toe and connect four and things like that is you gotta move, and they understand. You said, do you see how you're moving? And if you slow down, the other team catches up, it reinforces that skill. And then, obviously, the talking piece, which is really a problem across the game at all levels right now. But I'm talking about competitive team building exercises. I also have collaborative team building exercises, which really transfer in the way that you're talking about where together they have to accomplish something. So the paper plate one is one of those. I always tell teams, and I'm not going to give away the secret here, but I always tell teams, that the goal of this drill is to get the entire team, the entire team, from one side to the other. And what ends up happening is one player will really be focused on getting only their teammate to the other side, and they'll get there and they'll start cheering like they did it. And I say to them, this isn't the goal. The goal is to get the whole team over there. Now, that that transfers to hockey, that if you're the kid who goes on the breakaway and doesn't pass or you're the kid who's not playing defense, we need everyone involved. Another one that I do that, I love it. Sometimes I'll make this competitive, and sometimes I'll make it. The whole team is, I'll have them stand in a circle and lock arms, and then I'll put a hula hoop. I'll say, you know, unlock your arms for a second, and I'll put a hula hoop on their arms, and I'll say, everyone needs to move through this hula hoop. So sometimes the hula hoop travels around the group. Sometimes the group travels through the hula hoop again, there's a lot of different ways to do this, but the problem solving skill sets that they do transfer, and this is why. This is my belief. All right. I think most coaches would agree with me that what I'm trying to do from an accountability standpoint as a coach is get the team to be a learning team. So I want kids, and believe me, parents listening. This can start really young. There's going to be an assumption what I'm about to say can't be done and might, and it's not true. I want the kids to start thinking for themselves when they make a mistake. So I'll use kind of a middle skill set. If one of the kids doesn't have a great pass, I don't want them to complain that they suck at passing. And I do want them to come to a coach, but I also want them to critically start thinking, what about my pass is off? What about my balance? My legs? Start asking great questions. So when I do the team building mic, I reinforce, ask me questions. I'm not. This isn't. I will tell them, if it's, you're not allowed to ask me questions, figure it out. But I tell them, great questions will lead to great answers. And a lot of times the questions they ask are like, what are the rules of the game? Because I don't give them that. If I say, get this hula hoop around, I only tell them, get the hula hoop around. Then they'll start asking me, well, wait, can we do this? And I'll say, yeah, I didn't say you couldn't do that. Can we do that? Yeah, I didn't say you couldn't do that. Can we do this? Absolutely not. That's breaking the rules. But the idea is they're critically thinking. And the other key point of it, Mike, is that they're looking to me for some guidance. But when you see these kids start talking to each other and communicating with each other, it's really magical. The other thing is, too, these drills, and this is important for all the coaches listening. The drills I do are designed to uncover inconsistencies in the team. So if we have a communication problem, the drills will show that. And again, to answer your question, it gives me the ability as the coach to say, hey, see, this is the communication issues that we have. Let's talk about how we can solve them in this drill. You can't all speak at once. If you have an idea, and this is how I present it, if you have an idea to how to do this drill, how can we organize those thoughts? I won't say this kid talk and nobody else talk, right? Or, I've had this happen, too. They're all talking, and I can hear a kid saying the right answer. And I'll start saying, you guys might want to listen to each other. Someone is saying the right answer, right. It sounds kind of funny. By the way, I do all of these with adults, too. These aren't limited to just youth hockey. I've done these with businesses, too, and they work. But, yeah, do you see? Am I answering your question? Like, the skill sets of the team transfer to the game, and you can give me any situation in the game. Special teams, five on five, winning the game, losing the game. There's always a team bond aspect that will will appropriately put them in that position. Here's another one. They're coming to me as I'm thinking here. We've all experienced in youth hockey. You're up by three goals and the team gets cocky. It happens all the time. When you do team building, you can do exercises to reinforce, hey, you're winning right now, but if you don't focus the rest of the way, you're going to lose. I do a lot of timed drills where you have to do something in a certain amount of time, and they'll be doing great halfway through the time. And I'll say, hey, don't get cocky because I've seen teams get this far and they fail at the drill because you guys are slowing down. It all applies. 

Mike Bonelli [25:52 - 26:00]: It's so cool with kids, too, because you can put groups together that you know are going to win, and then you can change a kid or two in the group without them really knowing you're doing that. 

Lee MJ Elias [26:00 - 26:00]: Right. 

Mike Bonelli [26:00 - 26:08]: You can create the atmosphere of, well, you just lost. I know you were hooting and hollering a second ago and you were laughing in the other kids faces, but now you're losing. 

Lee MJ Elias [26:08 - 26:08]: Yeah. 

Mike Bonelli [26:08 - 26:19]: And I love that kind of stuff. And I think it's. But maybe talk it, too, about, you know, the threshold for that team building. Like, when is it? When are you going over? 

Lee MJ Elias [26:19 - 26:19]: Right. 

Mike Bonelli [26:19 - 26:26]: And now it just doesn't become effective anymore because you think you're being successful. Right. But don't you want to keep them coming back for more? 

Lee MJ Elias [26:27 - 28:25]: Absolutely. Yeah. Look, you got to make it fun. All right? And again, I always tell people it's not gym class, but it's a lot like gym class. Like, all the kids in our hockey team are athletes. Right. It's like you don't have anybody doesn't like gym, most likely. Right. So you got to make it fun for them. And I think a lot of that's in the messaging. This is not a time for me to yell at them. It's a time for me to have fun with them. Now, with that said, to your point, I talked about reading the pulse. There are some weeks I can tell they're not maybe not feeling it as much as other weeks. I'd say it's a 80 20 split to 80%. They're great. 20% of the time. It might be the time of day, the time of year. Maybe they're sick. There's a lot of different things. If I get the gauge that they're not feeling it, I may end it early or I might not do it. At all. If I'm on the ice and I feel like, hey, it's just not a good day, there's no team building tonight, or I'll give the pots a, give your parents a night off tonight, you just got to read the pulse of it. If I feel like this is another one, if I feel like I'm getting frustrated, which does happen, I may end it early because it means I'm not feeling it that night or something's going on. So you really have to have a gauge on it. But if you keep it fun and you have a plan, most of the time it's going to work. And again, Mike, to answer your question, if you take a few weeks off or a month off, uh, it's not the end of the world, right? If you feel like your team is really humming and doing good, uh, I, I wouldn't say that's the time to stop, but I think you can take a week off there if you want. I think it's actually time to keep doing it. If things are going well, don't change anything. But, yeah, 20 minutes, they have fun with it. Uh, again, nine teams out of ten, Mike will halfway through the seasons. Can we do this drill? Can we do that drill? Can we do this drill? And then it becomes a reward. If you do good this week, I'll do that drill next week again. Right. So, yeah, again, you gotta gauge it a little bit. You gotta feel it a little bit. If you're not feeling it, just don't do it. It's okay. There's no, there's no. You gotta hit this many team building sessions a year to be successful. 

Mike Bonelli [28:26 - 29:15]: I just wanna hit on one more piece of team building. And I think especially at the youth level, right, because you don't, you don't, you don't get to go to a training camp. I mean, I've seen really strong teams like these academies that come out that the kids are living together and they're, they're always with each other and there's a lot of time to do these kind of things. Those teams seem to be much more successful as a group. What could we do as a coaching staff to try to influence and help get our parents to be in some type of team building? I mean, obviously, you don't have a lot of parents that are going to go, you know, probably do the hula hoop race, but what can we do to encourage parents and hide, you know, you know, hide the vegetables in the ice cream a little bit there and, you know, how do we get, how do we get parents to be involved with team building without them really even, you know, thinking they have to commit to team building? 

Lee MJ Elias [29:15 - 29:19]: Yeah. My mom used to put the vegetables in the muffins, and she was really good at it. It was a few times. 

Mike Bonelli [29:19 - 29:23]: Now you can now get. Throw it in a shake and you're good to go. Makes it easy. 

Lee MJ Elias [29:23 - 33:06]: I remember saying, why is there carrots in my muffin? There's a lot of ways. Look, I think one of the things, and this is a form of team building, I had a coach actually come up to me recently and say, we're not having a cohesive time as coaches. What do you suggest? And I said, well, are you having a weekly coaches meeting? And the answer was no. And it's like, you know, look, I don't know how at any level, even if that's 15 minutes, you're not having a call just to discuss what you want to accomplish at practice this week. This is a little harsh thing to say, but if you don't have the time to do that, what are you doing? Like, why are you coaching? Like, you know, you gotta at least be able to put 15 minutes into planning to practice each week, um, especially at the younger level. So I always say that the coaching staff is a team within the team and you should be having calls. And again, look, when you're an adult, sometimes those calls can serve as team building because you're getting to know each other. You're talking. One of the things I love about my son's coach right now is he comes right out and says, like, look, I don't have an ego. If you have an idea or a thought, you tell it to me. And we all, we all respect he has the final decision, but that makes us feel like a team. Right? Again, as adults, it sounds kind of campy. Go get some beers once in a while to have a conversation, um, involving the parents. Now, there's a few ways to do this. So a lot of the times with the team building drills I do, the parents are kind of there. So I'll involve them in a drill, whether they're holding something or I'll say, get to that person. Or, my favorite thing is for the parents that are willing, and I never, ever again say this, force anybody to do it. I love doing parents versus kids type drills where we're doing the same drill. They're insanely low impact. Like, I would not invite the parents to do the sprinting drills, but, like, when I'm doing something, like, you have to pass an object around in a certain order in a certain amount of time. Well, everybody can do that, right? So the kids love competing against their parents, for obvious reasons. And the best part for me is the parents, especially when you're doing the younger ages that the ten years, the eight years, parents always think they're going to beat them. And it's just they're surprised with how smart the kids are and how creative they can be. Because a lot of times, Mike, I hate to say this, you got to think like a kid to kind of accomplish some of the drills. And I think as we get older, we forget a little bit how to do that. But at the end of the day, everyone's smiling and everybody loves the team building. So just that time together helps create some cohesiveness. I also want to say this, too. Like, I don't want to say it's a mistake. It's a misconception that, like, a pizza party is team building. Right. Team meals are great. I encourage them whenever you can do them. But they're not team building. They're just timed together, and that's an important piece of it. But for those of you listening that are parents or just adults, when your company rewards you, I'm, quote, doing quotations. With a pizza party, like, what is it really? It becomes a commiseration party. You talk about all the things you don't like for the most part. I mean, that's not every business, but, like, the pizza party is not team building. Team building is getting a group of people or kids together to accomplish a goal. Together with some parameters. The kids love it, and it completely applies. And again, the reason we've titled this episode tip to save your season is that if you're having problems, this is typically a great solution. Right. Um, again, Mike, a lot of times people at the younger age focus on the outcome of the game, the score, more than anything. I'm not telling you the score is not important. I'm not telling you that you shouldn't be playing to win, but I'm telling you, when you're down five, nothing in the middle of a game, you need to know how to change the win of a game. All right? And the win might be have a great shift, or the win might be work together and don't quit. And a bonded team knows how to do that. I think everything is an opportunity for team building, but that's just how my brain works. Right. But again, I hope I missed it. 

Mike Bonelli [33:06 - 34:02]: One of the best. One of the best team building things I've just seen in the past couple of months was a college team doing. Doing a pizza party, but building their own pizza and everybody having to figure out the ingredients. How do you make the dough and how do you do the pizza? And then you have the people that know how to cook and don't know how to cook, and. And all this other stuff's going, how to clean, how to click. You know, there's. I agree with you. You can't just throw twelve boxes of pizza into a conference room and say, oh, look, we did team building. We had the kids eat together because the kids that. The kids and the kids that, you know, the kids that are in their clique are going with that group, the other kids are going with their group. The kid that's gluten free is going with his group, and then everybody's like, you know, kind of missed, is missing out on the opportunity to grow. And I think, to your point, all these little nuanced things that you can do that take 20 minutes, that don't take any money, that take a little bit of planning, although you could just do it if you had to. 

Lee MJ Elias [34:02 - 34:04]: I wing it sometimes. Just be creative, right? 

Mike Bonelli [34:04 - 34:38]: And if you see, like, oh, I have an opportunity here. This is unbelievable. Like, we, we ended early, or the Zamboni broke down, or the excuse of saying, ah, it's like, how many times have we shown up at the rink and there's no, like, the ice time isn't ready? Or like, and it's just like, oh, just have the kid. This is the time. Grab it. You have them use it. Build something in. Put this in your back pocket. You know, you know, send. Send Lee a note and say, give me a. Give me an 18 minutes cheat sheet. I'll give you what I can do. When I showed up to a practice and it was the ice wasn't ready on top. Let me do something. 

Lee MJ Elias [34:38 - 39:03]: I'll tell you this, too, Mike, that a few kind of, I guess, final thoughts here are it's important to get the kids doing something together that's not on the ice and not necessarily hockey. Like, that's. That's one of the things that makes it team building, is that you're not so much focused on an outcome on the ice, you're focused on an outcome as a group. And it should never be assumed that the kids do that on their own. Right. There are some teams that are naturally more bonded than others, but it's not a given. Like, you gotta do this. And I think the teams that are more bonded benefit from this even more than the teams that aren't um, and again, I'll use an example right now. Like, like, uh, elementary school teams are one of my favorites because you got kindergarten to fourth grade. I mean, that is a massive age gap that spans two, three levels of hockey. All right? So, yeah, I got six year olds out there with ten year olds. That's a massive gap. So my attitude, there's, there's multiple levels here as an organization, I don't split them up. People go, why don't you split the younger kids and older kids? Because I want the older kids to mentor the younger kids, and I want the younger kids to see the older kids as mentor. Now we're teaching leadership. Now we're teaching mentorship on top of it, too. They may split up on the ice, but we're all part of the same team. Do you know what a first grader feels like when a fourth grader has his or her arm around their shoulder saying, I was where you were once. Don't assume that's not going to happen. Yeah, these kids are snotty nose kids sometimes to you as parents, but you enable them with team building. It's amazing what they can do. One of the great things that I break early in the season, what I just described is not always the case. When I do drills and I've got a young kid in the drill, six, seven years old, they're probably going to screw the drill up. All right? Just, they're young, and I love it because the first time I do it, you'll see 3rd, 4th graders in this situation, like, go, come on. You know, and I go, no, no, no. If one of us fails, all of us fails. You need to help this kid do it. Encourage them, talk to them. And I'm telling you, I've never had a problem with the kids learning from this. And when it gets to that kid, they understand of, like, look, this kid might not do this part of the drill as fast, but we need to support them because I'll usually put another first grader in the other group, too. And they start to realize, when one of us fail, all of us fail. Now, you tell me how that transcends the hockey. I think everybody listening could do that. But there's, everything is an opportunity, and then listen, just one more thing you mentioned that made me think here you talked about kind of the planning for them. There have been days I've had a great plan for a team building exercise, and something bad happens at practice, and I switch on the fly to kind of accommodate what happened to practice or at the last game, we had a situation last year where everyone was blaming one kid for a poor play. That kind of ended the game, and I was a little frustrated because I didn't see it that way. I was able to change my drill and express that we just don't do that. Whether you think that's true or not, that's. That's not. It's a waste of time to blame them. It was a situation where them blaming them on the ice actually resulted in the goal. So everybody played a role in it, and I was able to reinforce that fact. I'm going to tell you this right now. At the end of the season, that team won a championship. You could see the difference. They supported each other. They were. Every time someone scored, it felt like everyone on the ice had scored that goal. That's a tough thing to defeat, right, in a team environment. I'm not saying it can't happen. I always say the only thing that can beat a bonded team is another bonded team, assuming the talent level is equivalent. Right. But it's so important, Mike, beginning of the season and throughout the season to incorporate these team building things. And again, look, if you're sitting there going, I don't even know where to be in, man. Just go online and search great team building drills for eight year olds. You'll find a flurry of them. You might have to get a little creative with how you do them, but a lot of times, that's where I go for ideas. I found the ones that I like that work the best. But you can find any team building drill, and as a coach or a parent or an assistant coach, add whatever message you want. Okay? We're doing this because we need to work on this aspect of team. Okay. I would never say, well, we're not doing great with our right side stops. That's why we're doing team building today. That's not the point of it. But I will say this. I have never worked with a team, ever, to my knowledge, that has not benefited greatly from the team building. I mean, it's. It's always a positive. Right. And sometimes when you have a bad practice, team building is the best thing you can do. 

Mike Bonelli [39:04 - 39:11]: I mean, have you ever seen pin the tail in the donkey as a. As a negative piece in a birthday party? I mean, they don't do that anymore. 

Lee MJ Elias [39:11 - 39:13]: Only the actual donkey. Yeah. 

Mike Bonelli [39:13 - 40:47]: Like, yeah, right, right. But everybody. Well, trust me, if I'm there, there is a donkey. But I think. I think they're. I think. I think it always like it. You know, listen, and I'll just give one, one point here, too, from an organizational perspective. I just did a brick weekend. Like, these are the little kids, the best kids around. They're really, really great athletes. They're really, you know, really in tune players in, like, a little training camp. And our junior kids were the kids that actually helped facilitate it. And after I did the team building and the activities with the. With these, you know, seven and six year olds and eight year olds, the older guys were begging to do it with their team, and they were just helping. They're like, we want. Like, that was unbelievable. Like, look at the kids. And they had fun, and they got involved, and they wanted to be involved. Everybody wants to have that feeling success. If you can do it off the ice, even better. We're in helmets, and we don't see faces. And it's just the levels of kids are just, you know, they're. Goalie is not really, you know, the nice thing on team building exercises off the ice is everyone's pretty much equal. It's all, you know, we're all in the same, you know, kind of constraint system, and we can do what we want with it. But I think we can also work on the fly and move kids around and create little competitions and little thought processes that help us get to the end result we want. And I think if you follow Lee's, uh, advice and go to his site, go to. Go to our kids, play hockey. Ask the question. It's. I listen, I send out stuff all the time. Like, oh, try this, and then let me know how it works. 

Lee MJ Elias [40:47 - 40:47]: Right? 

Mike Bonelli [40:47 - 41:14]: And then. And it always works. It always works. And so, no, it's. Again, it's early in the year. Don't let your. Don't let your season get away from you. If you're. If you've just won every game the past two weeks, do this. And if you've lost every game the last two weeks, do this. It's just. This is the right time to do it and set the tone. Your parents will appreciate it, your kids will love it, and I think you'll get to know your players much better than you thought you did well. 

Lee MJ Elias [41:14 - 44:05]: And I'll end on this note, too, Mike, and we say this on the podcast a lot, and it's so true. Look, greater people make greater hockey players. Right. The better of a person you become. It does translate to the ice in a lot of different ways. When you apply that to everybody on the whole team, you're creating a really wonderful environment. Right. Like, I. Look, I wish everyone's season could be a winning season with a championship. I do, but that's not the reality in sports. Someone's got to lose, right? So, at the end of the day, if you want to win each and every practice, each and every day, you got to bond this team and make them care about each other. And we won't get this on the episode today, Mike. But one of the cool things I'm seeing now is, first off, I get a lot of coaches that ask me, like, hey, can you come in and do this? Can you come in and do a team building exercise? Which I appreciate. I try and try and encourage them, like, you know, you can do it. You don't need me to do it. But here's another thing. Like, just to think about everybody listening. Most organizations, your kids are on kind of different teams each year, year to year, in the sense of, like, you got new kids, you got. You got some old friends, you got some new friends. What I'm finding now, because I've been working with certain organizations for three to four years, is the cohesiveness of kids rejoining each other or playing with each other for the first time that have done team building together at some point. So now they're walking in to a kind of an understanding of team building. So, again, my son's team, I have worked with almost every athlete on that team, and they. They get it. Like, they remember it. They know each other. They know when we do team, I don't get any pushback, right. And it's like, it's a pretty wonderful environment. I don't want to say it's like a wonderful environment. You want to be with the theme. You want to be around them. And I can tell you right now, the record does. Has nothing to do with that. Like, we're not ten and, oh, all right, it's pretty much 500, and everybody wants to get to the rink to be together, and that's the result of three or four years of this. Right. And I think more organizations should do that. I don't. I can't stand it when you go from one team, a b team to an a team. You don't know anybody. That should never be the case. Like, you're an organization. The kids should know each other. All the squirts should know each other no matter what level they're at, or mites or peewees, whatever. You want to talk about it. So I'm with you, Mike, on what you said there, that they're. The beginning of the season is by far the most impactful time. But at any point in the season, you can do this. And look, as Mike said, email us team at our kidsplay hockey.com dot. I'll be happy to send you some, some free drills if you want to try some of those. And Mike, Mike is right. I do a lot of talking about this on my instagram, which is just at Lee MJ Elias, that's e l I a s on my instagram or my website, game seven group.com, all spelled out. You can find a lot of information at those places. And Mike knows I give a lot of this stuff away for free because it really does benefit the kids. But coaches listening, you can do this. You can do it. 20 minutes is not a lot. And you just, again, minimum 20 minutes a month. You can accomplish this for your team. 

Mike Bonelli [44:06 - 44:15]: Yeah. Awesome. Take it. Take the advice. Use it. Throw it into your next team snap or sport engine calendar and next week and use it, whatever you use. 

Lee MJ Elias [44:15 - 45:16]: All right, well, it's weird. You kind of interviewed me there, but I'm going to end the episode there. That's going to do it for this edition of our kids play hockey. I said a few minutes ago how you can reach us. Just want to thank you generally as an audience for listening to this show and remind you that the network is pretty vast. Here we have our kids play hockey, our girls play hockey, the ride to the rink, our kids play goalie. We got something for everybody here. And we just continue to grow on a weekly basis. And we can't thank you enough for the trust you've put in us as hockey friends, hockey family around the world. That's how I always say it. So that's going to do it for this episode. We'll see you on the next one. Remember, have a good time. Skate on. We hope you enjoyed this edition of our kids play Hockey. Make sure to like and subscribe right now if you found value wherever you're listening, whether it's a podcast network, a social media network, or our website, ourkidsplayhockey.com. also, make sure to check out our children's book when hockey stops@whenhockeystops.com. it's a book that helps children deal with adversity in the game and in life. We're very proud of it. But thanks so much for listening to this edition of our kids play hockey and we'll see you on the next episode.