Reply To: IIHF

[Tom Molloy]

Eric the conference was held May 7-10 in Heidelberg Germany. It was during the first week of the men's world championships. There were 260 coaches there from around the hockey world including places like Australia, South Africa, Korea and all the major hockey nations. A bus brought 50 coaches from Sweden.

The general concesus is that we are teaching the skills of the game but not teaching the kid's how to play the game. Game sense, game understanding etc. So most of the speakers stressed this aspect of coaching. There were some talks on off ice training, efficient use of the ice and how to handle players but the stress was on improving game play.

Daniel Coyle was the first speaker and he just wrote the book "The Talent Code" and he describle how our brain works in learning any kind of skill from speaking and walking to music and sports. The research says that anyone can learn anything if they are motivated to do it and spend the time to learn little bits at a time correctly and then reach a little beyond their comfort zone to learn more and more while always correcting mistakes. This creates learned patterns in our nervous system that are wrapped in a fatty substance called myelin and the more we perfect these patterns the more myelin wrapping and the faster we are able to do things. To be world class in anything takes about 10 years and 10 000 hours to produce these super efficient myelin wrapped circuits.

"Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals." So we learn in small chunks that must be perfected before moving on (deep practice) afer we have a picture of the whole skill in our mind. We need to slow skills down and then learn to do them more quickly. Repeat and repeat. (think of how a baby learns to walk by trial and error.)

Something ignites this desire to learn and without it no one will put in the time and effort to do deep practice. To do this you need Master Coaching to guide you through the process.

Anyway that talk set the theme for how do we ignite players to want to be excellent, how do we use practice time efficiently to train. The problem comes because learning the technical skills is quite straight forward like learning music or how to read. You develop skills in isolation like how to do a toe drag or wrist shot.

LEARNING TO PLAY TEAM SPORTS IS A DIFFERENT KIND OF LEARNING. Instead of just having the skills team sports demand that you know when and where to use these skills based on cues around you like where you are on the ice, where your teammates are, the opponents, everyones speed, etc. So the circuits for this kind of learning demand all kinds of branches that recongnize the when and where and the appropriate response. We don't get that in simple skill practice.

Daniel went to Brazil to see why they produce so many world class soccer players. What he saw was a small area 5 on 5 game played on a basketball court sized field with a smaller heavier ball that doesn't bounce much. Futbol de salao or "soccer in a room" or as we say futsal. The kid's don't play on a big soccer field. They play this game in the small space and it keeps them involved more because you are always in the action and need quick moves, game awareness, close support etc..

So on this theme various speakers discussed how to incorporate more games into the on ice and off ice practices.

Juhani and I have been trying to promote this idea for years and they are slowly catching on. The speakers showed many small area games and games using jokers. So the idea is gaining momentum. They still don't get the idea of using modified rules that require certain skills such as only use a forehand pass, or only skate backwards but at least they recongnize the value of games at the IIHF level. My experience is that the Swedes have used games for many years and we do some games in North America. Coaches like Bill Beaney of Middlebury college have been using games for years (and winning National Championships). So I guess the idea is going from a fringe coaching technique to more of a mainstream concept.

Anyway I just uploaded the level 0-1 videos that are for teaching beginners how to skate, shoot and handle the puck. Half of the 55 cards are games. I still have to put titles on everything.

'The Game is the Greatest Coach'
'Enjoy the Game'