Reply To: Good Habits at Practice? The Art of Coaching!

[DMan]

Thanks Dean,

I have both of Tom's books, and they have helped me a lot over the last two years. It's easy to fall into a rut though, and to keep repeating the same activities so I'll go back and look at book 2. In terms of our skill I'd say we just meet level 4 criteria by Tom's book standards.

We have 90 minute practices so there's lots of time for skill development. I have been following a routine pretty close to what you outlined, shooting for a minimum of 30 minutes of games & scrimmage per session. Today I tried using 2 v 2 cross-ice games as a warm-up and it was great…..the kids loved it, the intensity was high, and I think it made for a better practice on the whole.

I appreciate the feedback on the development issues. The hard thing is we can usually hang in games, but always get clobbered on special teams. It's pretty hard to run a powerplay effectively when you don't spend much time on it.

Dave