Read Time: 5 min

The Idea: Effective Team Activities

What’s in this newsletter?

• 📈 A proven process to install culture into your team.

• 💾 A framework for how we think about building team activities.

• 👏 A List of Team Activities for you to use.

This may be the most value-packed newsletter we’ve written yet. We are pumped to hear your feedback.

Hi! Seth here.

In May, we wrote a newsletter about a Team Activity centered on one of our Power Tools, the Support-Challenge Matrix. It’s a tool designed to enhance your feedback as a coach and your players’ feedback with each other. Still, to this day — that newsletter is one of our most-read.

This tweet received a lot of engagement last week. Within minutes, it had 19 bookmarks and is now up to 33.

Clearly, this resonated.

This has been our experience working directly with coaches and programs as well. Coaches and leaders are exposed to a lot of great ideas. They don’t need more ideas. What they need are better ways to implement those ideas in their program.

We’ve all been a part of a team where the leader or coach was inspired by an idea. They showed a video in a team meeting that they saw on YouTube or Twitter (X, whatever). The leaders speaks extremely passionately about it. It serves as an inspiration or motivation for a couple practices. But, by the end of that week, it’s gone. On to the next idea.

What those leaders need are systems.

Let’s get right to it.

 📈 Building Healthy Culture

You can build team activities around any idea. Culture is simple. It takes two things.

1. Language

2. Visuals

But, in order for an idea to take hold and “install” itself into your program, what process should we consider as leaders to make sure doesn’t just sit at short-term inspiration?

💾 Installing Culture Software…..

Here are three questions to ask yourself about any idea you think about introducing to your team.

1. How will you introduce the idea?

2. How will you reinforce it daily?

3. How will you use it to inspire when you need it?

If you can write your answers to these questions, the idea is probably ready to go. If not, maybe it should wait.

And be wary of introducing too many ideas. If you chase five rabbits you catch none. Many coaches and leaders are guilty of confusing their team because of “idea overload.”

Number 2 here is especially important. In order for any idea to take hold, you’ve got to use it daily. How will you work it into your language? How will you use it every single day?

Think about the tweet above. Forcing players to write what actions they’re going to carry out in practice that ties to what they want to be remembered for is the “secret sauce” of that activity.

The pairing of players and having them rate each other is a simple, efficient way to have the players be accountable to their actions. It also reinforces that you care enough to have them do that.

👏 The Team Activities

We built the Culture Playbook to be exactly that — a playbook for coaches to master the ideas above.

Below are two more activities you won’t find in the Culture Playbook. But, this will give you a feel for how we operate.

One Word Activity (5-10 Minutes)

The One-Word Activity is ideal for a first session with a new team to support relationship building between and amongst athletes and coaches. You will have plenty of tactical meetings about your sport. Make the first one about connection.

Remember, your athletes trust in you is the primary tool you have to affect their motivation level. The things they want to know first are ‘Can I trust this person? Do they care about me?’”

• Give every athlete a sheet of paper and ask them to write one word that best describes them.

• Put them into groups of 3-4. Have them share why they have chosen that word.

• Ask the group one thing the heard that they thought was interesting or that resonated with them (this forces them to be interested before interesting).

It’s simple, but, before long, everyone’s sharing, laughing, and getting to know each other.

This newsletter is already longer than most. So, we won’t take up more of your time. We know it is precious. But, below is a list of other Team Activities without descriptions. Some of them are in our Culture Playbook. Some aren’t. If you want to hear more about any of them, just email us.

• I Wish My Coach Knew

• Athlete Profile Cards

• Celebrate-Clarify-Critique: A Methodology to have BETTER 1-on-1s

• Maximizing Feedback Between Your Players

Conclusion:

To build a strong, lasting culture in your team, it's not about having more ideas—it's about implementing the right ones with consistency and purpose. By introducing ideas thoughtfully, reinforcing them daily, and using them to inspire, you create systems that stick. The activities and frameworks in this newsletter are tools to help you embed that culture into the fabric of your team. Start small, stay consistent, and let your team's culture grow from intentional, everyday actions. Now it's up to you—take these tools, put them to use, and watch your team thrive.

BETTER This Week

Some celebrations this week.

• So cool to see the Culture Playbook in action!

• Two high schools that are using our Coach Performance System had their football programs named in the Top 25 in the country! Grateful for partners like Jenks and Owasso

The Culture Playbook + Cohorts

Coaches have access to a lot of coaching content. What they lack are systems.

The Culture Playbook is 10 leadership ideas with the exercises you need to install the ideas and culture into your program. It’s the exact system we use to help coaches build their programs around mindset, leadership, and performance. We’ve used it at schools like Oklahoma, Mississippi State, and Florida State.

Since the Culture Playbook was released almost a year ago, nearly 1,000 coaches have purchased and are using it for their programs.

You can get it for your program today.

Culture Playbook Cohorts

We are offering Culture Playbook Cohorts if you’re interested in exploring the Culture Playbook on a deeper level.

We’ve had a few dozen commitments over the last week and aren’t starting with very many cohorts, so reserve your spot today!

Monthly Calls + Powerful Content + Practical Application + Community = Accelerate Your Growth

If interested, simply DM Seth or Kevin on Twitter.