Teamwork and Hula Hoops

A day in the life of MEJO 584

By Elizabeth Sills

This past weekend, our class gathered on a crisp February morning for a team bonding field trip.

I won’t lie, the idea of a multiple-hour Saturday team bonding day wasn’t something I was entirely thrilled about. Of course, I was eager to get to know my classmates better and I do love a good high ropes course. However, I’m a relatively introverted person and I probably still have some residual team bonding trauma from middle school, which was the last time I did trust exercises. Memories of preteen awkwardness and frustration permeated my head as I walked up to the Carolina Outdoor Center pavilion.

Thankfully, these thoughts dissipated within a few minutes of being there. Despite the chilly temperatures and 9 a.m. start time, everyone was willing to participate and was generally pretty chipper. It didn’t hurt that Chris Hill brought doughnuts.

Plus, once we stepped out from under the pavilion and into the sunshine, layers were shed and fingers began to thaw. Sarah, Sawyer and Charlie Brown (he assured us that this is his real name), Carolina Outdoor Center experts, and our leaders for the morning, navigated us through a series of games.

One activity involved a bunch of hula hoops scattered throughout the grass with a team of four or five people assigned to each one. Charlie Brown dumped a menagerie of small toys into the center of the ring of hoops. Plastic snakes, rubber stress balls and food-shaped squeaky toys littered the field. The goal, Charlie explained, was to get all of the toys into one hoop.

So, as anarchic college students, we spent the first couple of rounds trying to capture as many toys as possible. As projectile rubber hamburgers flew over our heads, chaos ensued on the ground. People hoarded toys in sweatshirt pockets and clutched as many as they could in their hands. Serious defense was going down around the hoops. Guarding, blocking and questionable rule violations occurred.

After a few minutes of unstructured chaos, Charlie posed an interesting, seemingly unrelated question. “How many schools of media and journalism are there at Carolina?” As we began to connect the dots, an alliance between groups was proposed. When Charlie initiated the start of the game with his ceremonious toy dump, everyone walked to the center, stacking their hoops on top of each other around the pile.

In a way, working on a large-scale project can feel pretty similar to running around a field trying to grab dog toys from under people’s feet. We’re all working in story teams focused on one sector of Galápagan life, and we’re all working within our own specialties, whether that be reporting, photo/video or interactive. Plus, we’re all trying to coordinate everything as one class-wide team. It can be a bit overwhelming.

While our individual objectives are significant, remembering to widen our lens and focus (pardon the puns) on the ultimate goal of our project, to tell the stories of people on the Galápagos, is far more important. As we enter our final couple of weeks before departing for Ecuador, I’m working on focusing on the larger picture and recentering my metaphorical hula hoop.