Infinity and Beyond: Camp Liberty - teambuilding exercise

Last week we had our annual stake (equivalent of a diocese) YW (Young Women, girls from 12-17yrs) camp. This year the venue was the beautiful Bungonia National Park. Full of kangaroos and wombats that were easily spotted. Probably also full of snakes which I had been nervous about, but they had enough sense to stay out of our way. I was grateful about that since I was the camp nurse - my visions of having to treat snakebites thankfully did not happen.

On the first day there was a series of team building exercises, and my friend Tina and I were in charge of one. We had chosen a game involving plastic tubs and plastic balls of the type you find in ball pits. We only used 4 colours - 2 for each team so we could tell them apart.

We drilled holes in 2 tubs and threaded lengths of rope in different places. The ropes had loop-handles at the end for the girls to hold on to. They were only allowed to hold the rope by the loops.

The girls were in competing teams, 2 at a time. Our area was marked in a triangle with the start/finish at one point of the triangle and a cone in each of the other two points.

The rules were:

Teams were to choose one thrower. All the others would hold the bucket.

The girls were only allowed to hold the rope at the end/the loop and they had to work together to move their bucket.

The throwers stood 2-3 metres away from their teams and threw the balls for their team mates to catch in their buckets. Any balls that fell on the ground or bounced out of the bucket were lost.

When a team had caught 5 balls in their bucket, they had to run to each of the cones before returning to the start area where they had to manoeuvre the bucket (without touching the bucket, and only holding the ropes at the end loops) to empty their balls into a third and smaller bucket. Again, any balls that fell out during the running around, were lost.