Reply To: Diary of a Season 2012-13

It all starts on Saturday. I meet with the coach of the other Calgary team. We have gone from 3 to 2 teams and I am the only returning coach. Leah Copeland was the captain of the U of Alberta and has coached for a few years before returning to Calgary. We are going to meet to plan who runs which practices the next three weeks.

Week one: a conditioning camp for 5 days. There will be two 75 min. sessions per night with 25 in each session. Some of the better players are practicing with a group that is going to a tournament on the east coast in the USA, so they won't be in the conditioning camp.

Week two and three is the tryouts. There are 9 practices and that is followed by a draft. Last year we could protect 8 skaters and one goalie. There is a meeting Sunday morning to decide how we are going to disperse the players from the suspended team. I have suggested we divide the city into two regions to make it easier for the players to get to and from practice and avoid going thru the middle of the rush hour traffic. I don't think they are going that way. We usually practice right after school and Calgary is one of the largest land area cities in the world because most people live in single dwelling houses with yards, so it is really spread out.

So the teams will be in place by the end of August. I guess we have to start so early by Canadian standards because there is a National Championship and the playoff to get there take so long.

I talked with the coach of the Edge sports school and we agreed to have some specialty team scrimmages together once we are both organized.
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The national U22 and U18 womens teams have been having a selection camp the last week at Canada Olympic Park as well as the womens teams from Norway and Kazakstan. I have watched a lot of the practices and took clips of many of the practices. I really enjoyed the Kazakstan practice. They have a few good players but overall are pretty weak with some looking like they haven't played a long time. The coaching style is very different with drills combined with a lot of controlled scrimmage where the coach stops the play and corrects things. The Canadian practices have been more like a hockey school with simple drills, circuits and skill instruction. They have intra squad games every nigh for the evaluation.