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Giants assistant Glen Hanlon finds happiness teaching hockey to kids
Ex-Canuck goalie, pro coach thrilled to help grow the Giants and spend more time with family

By Elliott Pap, Vancouver Sun, September 14, 2011

METRO VANCOUVER — Less than a month into his dramatic career change, Glen Hanlon has discovered the biggest difference between coaching men at the professional level and coaching teenagers making $40 a week in the Western Hockey League.

Believe it or not, it’s passing the puck.

“Passing skills,” explained Hanlon, the Vancouver Giants new assistant coach. “I mean, they can stand still and make a pass but being able to receive a pass and give a pass at full speed, the completion rate through your whole group, top to bottom, is not as high as a team of professionals. The skating speed of the players is actually not that much different, it’s the ability to make and receive a pass.”

Hanlon, 54, has never coached kids before. He began with the Canucks as a goalie consultant after finishing his playing career in 1991. He then moved through the ranks as a Canuck assistant, an American Hockey League head coach in the Washington Capitals’ system, head coach of the Caps, followed by head coaching stints in Finland, Belarus and Slovakia.

He was living a vagabond life and moving his family around until his son Jackson, now nine, refused another move to Slovakia. So Jackson and Hanlon’s wife Keri remained behind in their Point Roberts home last year while Hanlon commuted to and from Slovakia throughout the season. It didn’t go well.

After the Slovakians fired him in the spring, Hanlon pledged to become a better father (his words) and took the Giants’ job to stay closer to home.

“When I wasn’t around, it was painful,” Hanlon said at the Giants’ training facility in Ladner. “When you start going away for two months at a time, the dynamic of your family relationship changes. This is the first time Jackson is going to the same school two years in a row. We have dinner together every night. It’s been a really, really great situation for us.”

Meanwhile on the ice, Hanlon is also discovering what he calls the “purest form” of coaching. Junior players are far from a finished product so there is a lot of teaching happening and, even better, a lot of listening.

“Players’ acceptance in doing the things we do here wouldn’t be accepted at the NHL level,” Hanlon noted. “You’re really taking the players and instilling work ethic and battle skills and individual development and this is where a lot of the intangibles are built in. My experience is if the NHL did what we do here, they would be so much better prepared. So that’s another big change.”

And there are others. Like being compelled to play someone who’s under a lucrative long-term contract despite the fact another player is out-performing him.

“At the NHL level, there are so many discussions on ‘well, if you tell this player that, is it going to be OK?’ ” Hanlon said. “Here you can do what’s right and there are no ‘ifs, ands or buts.’ It’s about who plays to make your team better. You make those decisions and you structure your practices for that and, to me, it’s been a lot of fun — and refreshing. It’s the way it should be.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."