Popular wisdom holds that we are
living in the age of the niche. Appropriately enough, team-building
companies are now offering some out-there activities that depart
from tired-and-true trust falls, paintball games and ropes
courses of years past.
One offbeat option is WhirlyBall, which
combines lacrosse, hockey and basketball with bumper cars. The
WhirlyBall (www.whirlyball.com) company has three Illinois
locations, where bumper car team members work together to score
baskets using plastic scoops. Visit whirlyball.org to find other
places where the sport is played and watch a game in action.
For those who don’t enjoy getting
knocked about, Canadian Outback Adventures (www.canadianoutback.com) organizes a barbecue
challenge where teams battle, Iron Chef-style, with
must-use ingredients in an outdoor cooking competition. After the
judges choose the winning team, it’s time to eat.
A do-good way to forge bonds: The
Helping Hands program from Odyssey Teams (www.odysseyteams.com) assists groups in building
prosthetic hands that are donated to those in need. Since the
program began in 2004, a total of 1,200 hands have been assembled,
750 of which have been distributed to amputees in foreign countries
including Colombia, India, Jordan and Kenya.