Good Habits at Practice? The Art of Coaching!

Hockey Calgary Statistics.

• 1 in 84,615 kids who play Hockey in Calgary will make it to the NHL. Therefore every six (6) years one (1) former Hockey Calgary participant will make it to the NHL. (Source: Hockey Calgary February Newsletter.)

<So parents… take a pill! Odds are against your kid paying off your mortgage! Keep it in perspective!>

Practice by the Numbers – Statistics supplied by: Calgary Hockey Development.

The following facts and figures relate to a 60 minute practice session:

• 1 efficient practice will give a player more skill development than 11 games collectively.

• Each player should have a puck on their stick for 8 – 12 minutes.

• Each player should have a minimum of 30 shots on goal.

• Players will miss the net over 30% of the time in a minor hockey practice.

• Coaches should try to run 4 – 5 different drills / games / activities each practice. More is not better; execution of what you do is development.

• No more than 5 minutes should be spent in front of a teaching board each practice.

• If you have 10 players on the ice, strive to keep 4 – 5 players moving at all times.

• If you have 15 players on the ice, strive to keep 9 – 10 players moving at all times.

• If you have 20 players on the ice, strive to keep 14 – 15 players moving at all times.

A Game by the Numbers – The following statistics were recorded during a 60 minute Pee Wee level hockey game in Calgary:

• Players will have the puck on their stick for an average of 8 seconds per game.

• Players will take an average of 1 – 2 shots per game.

• 95% of passes made backwards are successful.

• Players will take an average of 18 shifts per game.

• 99% of the feedback coaches give players is when they have the puck. Ironically, players only have the puck on their stick for 0.2% of the game.

The Hockey Canada National Coach Mentorship Program specialty clinics were designed to with the following messages in mind:

Keep Them Moving

Whether its practice, clinic, or camp, ice sessions should be designed to engage every participant consistently. Kids don’t attend practice to watch others play. Kids enjoy practices when they have fun and they experience an improvement in their overall skills. When kids have to stand in line, encourage them to handle a puck!

Emphasize the Fundamentals

Build a foundation that will never crack by properly teaching the basics. Learning the fundamentals and perfecting the same basics at every level of play is essential to having any chance of success. If one player does not execute the fundamentals (skating, puck control, passing and receiving, checking) correctly, the most sophisticated drill or play in the world will not work. It is unfair and not fun to focus on running plays that will fail 9 out of 10 times. Kids’ practices that focus on Team Play over executing fundamentals are cheating every participant out of the chance to learn the game properly. Do not attempt to replicate plays you see in NHL and Junior games! Every scheme that is attempted in a junior or NHL game is supported by years of training in the fundamentals of the game.

Incorporate a Progression of Skill Development for Every Participant

Regardless of a player’s skill level, it is your responsibility as a coach to teach every kid on your team (Make them capable!) It is no secret that if kids experience improvement in their skills, no matter what their athletic ability may be; they will continue to participate and return to learn more. Teach the skills in the proper order so you can continue to improve and build on each training session.

Considerations for Development

Following are some general observations of youth sports as stated in the Long Term Athlete Development Plan.
• Young athletes under-train, over-compete; Low training to competition ratios in early years
• Training in early years focuses on outcomes (winning) rather than processes (optimal training)
• Poor training between 6-16 years of age cannot be fully corrected (athletes will never reach genetic potential)
• The best coaches are encouraged to work at elite level; basically it takes 10,000 hours or 10,000 repetitions to master a skill.

With the ages of 9 – 12 being the most important for skill acquisition it is during this time period that the skills included in the specialty clinics need to be repeated consistently. To that end, the skills were chosen so that a coaching staff can work on these specific skills until a reasonable level of mastery is achieved and then move onto more advanced skills. Ultimately, if you as a coach can master teaching these skills and players can become proficient at performing these skills then success will be the outcome. The goal is to concentrate on teaching these limited quantities of skills and move on only once the players can reasonably master them.

Practice Tips (Courtesy of Calgary Hockey Development)

THERE ARE 10 KEY INGREDIENTS A COACH SHOULD MIX INTO EACH PRACTICE. COLLECTIVELY THESE LEAD TO ENJOYMENT AND LEARNING FOR BOTH PLAYERS AND COACHES.

1. Coaches should have a minimum of 50 pucks available for practice (typical roster of 20 players).

2. Players must be on time, all the time. Coaches set the standard and lead by example. Parents must be encouraged to buy in.

3. Don’t waste ice time stretching. Stretching should be performed in the dressing room before & after the ice time.

4. The use of stations in practices leads to a dynamic practice. Stations keep participants active enabling them to achieve high levels of repetitions. Have players spend 3 – 8 minutes per station before switching. Two or three stations are recommended. (Must be a coach at each station).

5. Basic Skill Development (skating, puck control, passing, shooting) should comprise 90% of your practice time. Remember you can work skills in game-like drills. Skill development should not be considered boring. It should be considered the building block to greatness!

6. Positive and Specific Feedback are imperative! “Good work” doesn’t convey enough information. Consider the Head Coach who always stands at center ice and runs drills. How often during the practice is this coach able to effectively teach? Teaching is done in the trenches (corners, lines).

7. Routines in practice are dangerous. Players will pace themselves and become bored very quickly. Routine practices develop great practice players. Strive to change things up, create an element of surprise, utilize variety, and generate enthusiasm. Creating competition (keep score – winners get a reward; losers get a punishment) raises intensity and most realistically prepares players for games. Players also enjoy “creative, constructive” time on their own. Five minutes per practice should be sufficient – at the beginning and / or end. This enables players to be creative and try new things; or work on areas of weakness. As coach, you have to make them understand this isn’t “screw around time” to prevent injuries and wasting the time!

8. “TELL ME AND I’LL FORGET, SHOW ME AND I MIGHT REMEMBER, INVOLVE ME AND I’LL UNDERSTAND”

9. Practice Execution by coaches is of principle importance. Great drills that aren’t executed properly by coaches are useless. Execution involves using all staff on the ice, having pucks spotted in the proper areas, informing players of the whistle sequence (1st whistle begin, 2nd whistle stop, 3rd whistle begins next group) and providing appropriate feedback. To assist in practice execution, name your drills i.e. “Killer Bees”.

10. Relate what you do in practices to games and vice versa. “Players, we are doing this drill because in our last game we were unable to finish around the net.” or “This drill will assist you in keeping your stick and body away from the checker and in an effective scoring position.”

Teaching the Game – By Tony DiCicco

Coaches spend an awful lot of time teaching tactics, often telling players, for instance, that they need to stay in their positions. But what's sometimes lost is the fact that soccer is a free-flowing expression of how you want to see the game unfold.

As a coach, clearly you need to keep helping players understand positioning and spatial awareness. But the last thing you want to do is lock players into specific and rigid roles by saying, "You stay here and you stay there." That's not the way the game ought to be played.

For instance, one thing I hate to see in training is a long line of girls waiting for their turn to go through a maze to practice dribbling. This methodology is totally unnecessary because players can do all the dribbling they need through free movement, where everybody's learning to be aware of space by being creative and improvising. That's how the actual game of soccer is played.

There are, however, specific activities I'd suggest as teaching tools. You can teach passing, for instance, by having the kids stand and pass the ball back and forth, but it's going to get pretty boring for them rather quickly. Instead, you can say, "OK, here's the game. We're going to see how many passes you can get back and forth between you and your teammate in 30 seconds. You're going to keep your own score. I expect everybody to be honest with the score and if the ball goes wild, you've got to go get it together and continue playing from your new location."

What you've done is set up a little competition and it becomes fun. There's also a little bit of intensity and urgency to their play. It's not just a boring drill, it's now a competition. And to spice it up a little, don't always make it a matter of the girls competing against each other. Sometimes you can have them compete against the previous high score, the coach, or even the scores of their parents.

STRATEGY. With young children, strategy and the tactics of the game will come later rather than sooner. My youngest son, who's 10 years old, is playing 11v11 soccer now, and his coaches asked me to have a chalk talk with them.

As we talked about what systems of play I might share with the team, I said, "At this age group, you're really teaching technique rather than strategy. It may cost you some games in terms of wins and losses, but right now it's better to teach the techniques of the game much more often than putting them out on the field and telling them where to run and when to run there. Anyone can teach tactics. But you can't learn technique overnight."

(Excerpted from "Catch Them Being Good: Everything You need to Know to Successfully Coach Girls" by Tony DiCicco, Colleen Hacker & Charles Salzberg courtesy of Penquin Books.)

Tony DiCicco coached the U.S. women's national team to the 1996 Olympic Gold Medal and the 1999 Women's World Cup title. DiCicco, founder and director of SoccerPlus Camps , will be the Boston Breakers head coach when the club begins play in April of 2009 in the new women's professional soccer league. He is currently coach of the U.S. U-20 women's national team.