Team Canada: World Games Training Camp

Elite players from across Canada are heading to Wroclaw, Poland from July 20 – July 30 to compete along side athletes from the 27 official sports and 4 invitational sports featured in the 2017 World Games.

VC is a proud sponsor of Team Canada and is excited to share stories about the path to Poland.

Over the June 10//11 weekend, Team Canada headed out of town for a training camp. We chose a kids camp out of town so that we could all spend time close together without the distractions of home life creeping in.

The focus on this camp really was team bonding and team communication with exercises all throughout the weekend designed to bring us together. One of the benefits of this particular camp was its custom built challenge course located in the nearby forest. It included a series of challenges designed to make you work together as a team. There were roughly 5 unique challenges in total, ranging from climbing over a giant wall, to swinging across a lava pit to land on a small platform (Survivor fans out there would have gotten a kick out of this!) to building a bridge over an alligator infested swamp Indiana Jones style to passing teammates through a laser fence that made me feel like Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment!

Each of these challenges were unique and all required every member from the team to complete. Tall, small, strong, nimble, each skill set was required at different parts of the challenges.

The most fascinating part was how traditional leaders or leadership structure didn't really apply. In each challenge a different person stepped up and very organically became the leader for that challenge formulating a confident plan and directing the team as needed. Whoever it was in challenge 1, it was someone completely different for challenge 2, except we never planned this or even talked about it. I think the organic nature with which it transpired showed up much everyone already trusted all of their teammates and the unique dynamic that a team like this has. It was really special to see everyone so easily working together towards a common goal.

The 2nd fascinating thing was the desire to complete the challenge at all costs. Personal boundaries did not exist whether you were being passed through the electric fence with hands all over your bathing suit area or holding onto each other for dear life. That was the longest and closest I have ever hugged Toly as the two of us tried to put all our weight on a 4 inch wide platform in order to support our fellow teammates. Fun fact, he's a great hugger and I felt very safe in his arms.

Learning to work together as a team outside of our normal frisbee world is so vitally important. It allows everyone to display their hidden talents and it breaks down any previous judgement of what people can or can't do or what someone would be good or not good at. Everyone starts from scratch with a new challenge that no one has done before, and it really forces you to rely on one another in order to survive the perils or alligators or lasers or lava.

I felt much closer to my teammates and respected their unique talents even more after this training camp.

For locals of Vancouver, the camp was called Charis camp and I highly recommend it.

The author, Morgan Hibbbert, in his VC Ultimate Team Canada uniform. Support the Team Canada program by sporting the gear from our TC collection here.