Pelicans - ice hockey team
what we did
The Pelican ice hockey team is from Lahti, Finland. They were in a challenging situation when New Beat and the team manager Hannu Aravirta agreed to use music for developing the team performance. Thay had lost 11 games in a row, and faced many changes during the fall season.
Hannu Aravirta got interested in the idea to use music for lifting up the team spirit and performance. There had been a lot of changes in the team, and the management had to rebuild the team quickly.
New Beat team designed an intervention for the team to break the loosing streak. The team was rebuilt as a band and challenged to practice and perform together. In just 2 hours the hockey team learned to play their winning song and performed it with a local rap artist Brädi to their fans and the members of Pelicans organization.
Results
The performance and the whole collaboration was a kind of a success story according to Aravirta. It was amazing how quickly the players found their roles in the band and how quickly they learned to play together. Aravirta saw the similarity in the roles on ice hockey ring and in the band. Some were in the supporting role (bass - defender) ) and some in the leading position (singer - striker).
The strongest impact was emotional and it was easy to feel and see the change in the players mindset during the session. Aravirta pointed out the fact that the team had several defeats behind and in the session they managed to loose tension and break mental blocks that were preventing their best performance.
As a result the Pelicans team played a knock out spring season and ended up winning several games.