Bowling as a Team Building Activity

 The point of team building activities is to get a chance to spend time with your staff outside the working environment and get to know them better on a more personal level.

 Its best to develop your own team building exercises whenever possible. No outside consulting company knows your people or your company culture as well as you do. If you’ve no experience of team building or are simply too busy doing your job, we’ll give you all the guidance you need.

Some people are concerned about using sports for team building, but I have built successful exercises around bowling, even for non-bowlers like me!

1.  Bowling As A Team Sport

Although bowling is usually seen on television as an individual sport, it is more common for bowling to be enjoyed as a team sport.  BOWL2DAY have league competitions for teams usually two nights of the week. While individual bowlers compare their scores against other individuals, bowling teams simply add their scores together and compare that against the other team’s cumulative score.

It is easy to build on that team aspect of bowling to use it as a team building exercise for your organization. 

2.  Building the Teams

The people you assign to a team will have to work together during the event to succeed. That determines how you assign them. For instance, if the Finance department were to have a bowling-based team building exercise, they would have to decide whether to make the teams along the functional lines (an Accounts Payable team, an Accounts Receivable team, a General Accounting team, etc.) to strengthen teamwork within those groups or to make the teams from members of the different functional groups to build teamwork within the department as a whole.

Try to balance the teams. If you have a few good bowlers, make sure you distribute them among the teams. Make sure you balance athletes versus non-athletes across the teams as well. The people with bowling experience or athletic skill will need to help their teammates. That’s what team building is all about, the people with a particular skill helping their team when it needs that skill.

Team Shirts?  Once you have established a bowling team, you could choose a team shirt for each member to wear. Work on designing the shirt together: choose a team name and a logo that team members agree they would like to have on their shirts. Working together on this project builds

3.  Getting Ready

At BOWL2DAY we have staff whose job is to help coordinate parties and events like team building.

Bowling requires special shoes that allow the bowler to slide when throwing the ball and that won’t scratch the wood floors of the bowling alleys.  At BOWL2DAY the shoe rental is included in the game/event fee.

Your bowlers may have their own bowling balls, we have a selection for the other participants to use. Bowling balls vary in weight from about 10 pounds to a maximum of 16 pounds. Bowlers should pick a ball that’s weight is easily controlled. It is not necessary to pick the heaviest ball.

Again, the experienced bowlers can help the novices. Make sure the ball you select will slide easily off your fingers when thrown, but is not so loose as to fall off on your backswing. Don’t worry about this as we have a qualified instructor to demonstrate and even give lessons if you’d really like to develop your game.

4.  Different Bowling Games for Team Building

BOWL2DAY’s automatic scoring system keeps track of each bowlers score and totals so you can focus on your game and team.

The easiest team building event would be to have each team bowl three games and add up their scores for each player for all three games.

You can easily vary that by adding different styles of games. For example, in game 1, everyone bowls normally; in game 2, they switch to their opposite hand – righties bowl left-handed and lefties bowl righty; in game 3, pins knocked down only count if they exceed the frame number. The automatic scorers will total the first two games for you, but you’ll need someone on each team to keep track of scores in game 3.

5.  Competitions

You can create games for your team to play while bowling that give everyone a chance to win prizes. Consider a poker game. Bring a deck of cards to the BOWL2DAY. Each time a player rolls a strike, he gets two cards.  Each time a player rolls a spare he gets one.  Extra cards can be awarded for rolling three strikes in a row. Use extra decks if you run out of cards during bowling.

At the end of bowling competition, compare the cards each player has. Have each player form his best five-card poker hand from all of his cards with the player with the best five-card hand winning.

For prizes, each player can contribute an amount of money per game or the losing players are required to pay for the next pitcher of beer, pizza or other food item the team shares. This will all cultivate a fun, team-based competition.

Read more: Bowling Team Building Activities | eHow.com

6.  Reinforce Team Building with Awards

Decide ahead of time what awards to hand out at the conclusion of the event. Identical prizes should be given to all team members of the team with the highest score and of the second and third place teams. You may want to award a few individual prizes for highest score in each game. Humorous awards like most improved, worst bowler, lowest score, can lighten the mood as well as give you a way to include more non-bowlers in the prizes. We can help if you’d like trophies as we always keep them in stock.

7.  Bottom Line

A bowling-based team building exercise can work for your people and organization. It strengthens the relationships within a team or departments who work together on a long term basis. In addition, the experiences shared will have provide some good memories to keep everyone going when the going gets tough at your work place.

Call us on 01945 450629 to start building your team!