Practitioner Guidelines for Using Movie Clips for Team Building in Sport

Abstract

Although sport psychology consultants (SPCs) have reported using movie clips in the services they provide to athletes and sport teams, little attention has been given to how such clips are used, particularly in the context of team building. This paper presents practitioner guidelines for using movie clips in the context of team building by describing an intervention that was conducted with a high-performance men’s intercollegiate ice hockey team. Practical considerations (i.e., timing the intervention, selecting the movie clip, and working with the movie clip during the intervention) and research/theory-based principles (i.e., emotional tagging, providing contextual information, empathic connection, and metaphorical imagery) are discussed. Reflections on the process and potential future directions are presented.

Keywords:

• Effective team functioning
• Saving Private Ryan
• team cognition
• team cohesion
• team creed

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [JGHD], upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 We chose to report this specific intervention with the hockey team because the SPC who delivered the intervention still has detailed field notes surrounding the intervention, a copy of the final team creed that was generated through the intervention, and transcripts from post-season interviews with players who had participated in the intervention.

2 When an SPC uses a graphic movie clip (as is the case with Saving Private Ryan), trigger warnings should be provided in advance of showing the movie, and team members should be given an opportunity to withdraw from the viewing. Team members who choose not to watch the movie segment can still participate in the development of the team creed, although the SPC would need to provide those individuals with further contextual information. In the case of the illustrative example reported in this paper, no team members declined to watch the movie clip.