Sandy Jobin-Bevans looked out over a sea of faces in a crowded hotel conference room and zeroed in on a bored-looking hockey player half-awake in the back corner. \u201cYou there,\u201d he called out. \u201cFor massive bonus points: What duck-billed, egg-laying mammal was first discovered in 1799?\u201d<\/p>\n
The kid bolted upright. He hadn\u2019t been paying attention, but now he was desperately trying to recall the word \u201cplatypus.\u201d<\/p>\n
A lot was at stake. It was the National Hockey League\u2019s weekend symposium with Second City Works \u2014 an annual training and onboarding session for the league\u2019s newest batch of rookies \u2014 and more than 200 draftees had been separated into groups based on their teams and divisions for an intense game of rapid-fire trivia. The top prize was a $50 Apple gift card, and these players, many of them already worth millions, wanted it badly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey will do absolutely everything they can to win,\u201d said Jobin-Bevans, a comedian with the Second City comedy troupe and the host of the seminar. \u201cObviously, as hockey players, they all have that competitive spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Second City Works, the business-to-business arm of the Chicago-based comedy institution where Bill Murray, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert and Amy Poehler cut their teeth, was founded in the mid-1980s. It originally handled work for marketing agencies and advertisers, including creating humorous ad copy.<\/p>\n
But Second City leaders noticed that many of the people enrolling in its traditional improv classes were there to learn self-confidence, quick thinking and public-speaking skills for use in the business world \u2014 rather than as a steppingstone to a career in comedy. So the Works program shifted from marketing to \u201clearning and development\u201d that catered to corporate clients who \u201cwanted to apply these skills to their jobs,\u201d said Tyler Dean Kempf, the creative director of Second City Works.<\/p>\n
But over the past decade and a half, the program has expanded its client pool from corporate executives and sales teams to include a very different group: professional athletes. Using icebreakers, scene-building challenges and spins on the traditional \u201cYes, and \u2026\u201d improv exercises, Second City is teaching sports stars how to get loose, trust one another, and feel more comfortable in and out of games. That includes the breakneck trivia sessions, which Jobin-Bevins said help players speak up and interact.<\/p>\n
Teams and entire leagues have taken note. Second City has run improv workshops for the Chicago Blackhawks, the Chicago Cubs and Major League Baseball itself. The league\u2019s rookie career development program uses Second City to prepare incoming ballplayers for the demands of the sport.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re not taking these classes because they want to be the next stars of \u2018SNL,\u2019\u201d Kempf said. \u201cIt\u2019s because they want to apply these skills to their personal and their professional life.\u201d<\/p>\n
The NHL began integrating Second City improv into its rookie development plans in 2013, as part of a provision in the new collective bargaining agreement between players and the league that rookies would receive an orientation program after being drafted to a team.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re a young league, and we have a lot of 18-, 19- and 20-year-old players coming in who often haven\u2019t been to college or had any type of experience in the real world,\u201d said Bill Daly, the deputy commissioner of the NHL. \u201cWe wanted to get in front of them and show them the resources that we have and that we\u2019re in this for their best interests.\u201d The improv program, Daly said, was \u201ca passion project\u201d for him and the organization.<\/p>\n
Athletes may not have much experience with live theater, and Kempf said that the players coming into their programs seem, at minimum, highly skeptical. \u201cYou walk into these rooms sometimes, and everyone has their arms crossed \u2014 the body language is not thrilled about what we\u2019re trying to do,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd mostly that\u2019s because they\u2019re afraid. The word \u2018improv\u2019 instills fear in people. Fear of the unknown. Fear of looking a certain way.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is human nature, but it\u2019s especially true of pro athletes. \u201cThis is a group of guys who, maybe stereotypically, were all sitting in the back of their classrooms in high school, not participating,\u201d Jobin-Bevans said.<\/p>\n
The trick, Kempf said, is \u201cmaking them realize that the stakes truly could not be lower.\u201d<\/p>\n
The players aren\u2019t asked to do full-blown performances, but the exercises are broadly similar to Second City\u2019s typical comedy training, including interactive exercises and improvisational word games. In one, players are paired off and asked to use the last word of their partner\u2019s previous sentence as the first word of their response \u2014 an exercise that teaches them to listen.<\/p>\n
![\"Members](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/TOS-Z-ATH-IMPROV-0726.jpg\")
Members of the Chicago Blackhawks ice hockey team engage in team-building exercises while learning improv at a Second City workshop in Chicago on July 2. \u201cIt helps build camaraderie, doing improv together,\u201d said Jamey Horan, the National Hockey League\u2019s vice president for communications. (Evan Jenkins\/The New York Times)<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat they learn is that when a reporter is asking them a question, they can\u2019t assume they know where it\u2019s going and that they\u2019ve heard it a million times, because it shows the journalist that you don\u2019t care,\u201d Jobin-Bevans said. Another exercise asks them to recite the alphabet and count to 26 at the same time \u2014 A1, B2, C3, and so on \u2014 which teaches them \u201cthat if you\u2019re at your locker trying to change and you\u2019re being asked a question, it\u2019s hard to focus.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to preparing players how to deal with the news media, the program also aims to teach them about how to present themselves on social media platforms \u2014 skills honed with storytelling exercises like a game in which players are asked to tell a story in 60 seconds, then 30 seconds, then 10 seconds, paring down the information more and more to its essence each time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese athletes are about to become famous,\u201d Kempf said. \u201cThey\u2019re about to use their social media to promote their brand. It helps them to think about truly connecting with an audience and telling a story the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n
They also use scene work to show the players what can happen if media questions are answered the wrong way. Jobin-Bevins performs a scene in which he acts out \u201cthe worst-case scenario\u201d for an interview with tough questions, then asks the players to imagine a better approach. \u201cIt\u2019s more interactive, fun and funny for them to see it done this way,\u201d Daly said.<\/p>\n
The sports-focused improv classes don\u2019t deal so much with the actual sport, of course, but working together over the weekend can have a knock-on effect for the game. \u201cIt helps build camaraderie, doing improv together,\u201d said Jamey Horan, the NHL\u2019s vice president for communications. \u201cThese guys have never met before. After this, there\u2019s a level of respect when they meet on the ice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Professional athletes might come away from the improv classes learning some soft skills, too. \u201cWhat we discovered when we first started working with the NHL is that these guys had to be introduced to the concept of applauding,\u201d Jobin-Bevan said. \u201cThese are future superstars, so it\u2019s not something they ever had to really do before.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sandy Jobin-Bevans looked out over a sea of faces in a crowded hotel conference room and zeroed in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5115],"tags":[521,37,96,5263,5,4,62731,43],"class_list":["post-631416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago-blackhawks","tag-blackhawks","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-blackhawks","tag-chicagoblackhawks","tag-hockey","tag-nhl","tag-social-sports","tag-sports"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116987057140772946","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}