The classroom trembled as three seniors trampled up the noisy ramp to the portable full of unsuspecting French students. They swung the door open, and yelled "JUICE, JUICE, JUICE!" As they fled the scene laughing, their sophomore teammate should have sunk into his chair, beet red. Instead, feeling a surge of camaraderie, he shrugged off the embarrassment with a laugh.

From goalies with a propensity for losing pants to absurd nicknames and yells, my time on the Gunn soccer team has been one characterized by constant team bonding.

When I think of team building, I don't think of icebreaker activities and delicious pasta dinners; I think of the moments when players set aside their differences and have some fun together.

There's no way to fake togetherness. There may be potent aphrodisiacs made from a tiger's naughty parts, but no alchemist has yet concocted an elixir of friendship. There is not a get-rich-quick scheme that can forge unity from nothing.

It's just like chemistry. No one takes a sodium and chlorine atom into a sterile environment to carefully put them together into a perfect molecule of salt. People take a bunch of both and throw them together haphazardly, and lo and behold, out comes delicious salt.

During my junior year, when the team went to a tournament in Irvine, CA, I arrived a day late and missed the official team bonding session, which was supposedly punctuated by a "team building" activity ending in both groups mooning each other. No one remembers the activity, but everyone there recalls the absurd climax.

Even though I missed the evening when we were supposed to come together, a weekend of pranks, hallway soccer, cheating at poker and "accidentally" ordering exotic adult films came together to make a weekend and a team, that I won't soon forget.

Forget formulaic team bonding, and forget organizing meetings and discussing problems. Sport is a primal thing, playing Taboo or even sacrificing goats to Norse gods won't particularly help when the chemistry is bad.

As long as everyone is ready to show up and have some fun and not take themselves or others too seriously, the ensuing ridiculousness is all the team bonding you ever need.