The Stages of Team Development – Making Individuals into Team Members

All professional sports teams have a training camp. In baseball, it’s called Spring Training. Years ago, Spring Training was meant to help the players get back into shape after a long winter of sitting around and doing very little activity. Today, players work out and maintain their physical ability year round; so what is the purpose of Spring Training? One thing that has changed is that in the off-season, many teams make trades and free agents may decide to go to another team. When you combine this with the players coming up to the big leagues, this creates an influx of new members on a team, and the dynamics and continuity of the team changes drastically.