Reply To: What Happens in a Hockey Shift

[Tom Molloy]

This is a posting I made as an answer to a question on the old hockeycoach bulletin board. It was just before the Hockey Summit. I think the schools offering hockey has improved the ice usage and gives more quality instruction to young players, also practices are a little better but have we improved that much.

Are we coaching hockey in practice or are we teaching drills? Are we using the ice efficiently? Are practices fun or drudgery which kid's will walk away from as teenagers? (in the 90"s 83% were quitting by 14. How many now?)

JC,
I agree with you that everything is becoming more and more structured, eapecially in the cities. Parents don't want their kid's to just play because they are afraid that something awful will happen to them if they aren't supervised. They can't just go to the park and play with friends. It is only when they are teenagers that they let them go out by themselves.

This has caused the kid's to only play when an adult is running the ice time and this means that if the practice is inefficient the kid's neither learn anything or have any fun.

In order to develop puck handling and game sense you need to play a lot of games where you get the puck a lot and you have to figure out where everyone is. If the kid's only get on the ice with adults who run drill type practices then they never get to develop these kind of skills.

The small places are still producing skilled players because there is less coaching and more free play. Unfortunately the bantam draft has them leavig town at young ages and they play junior where the practices are all team play and skill drills. This stops their development of creativity.

The Europeans allow much more game situation play during practice and that is why they are developing the creative players and good stickhanders. Canada and the US combined have one million registered players. Sweden, Finland, Czech, Slovakia, Germany, Latvia combined have a few hundred thousand and they are the ones who produce the imaginative players that we used to have in abundance.

It boggles my mind that we can't simply learn from the methods they use to produce good individual and team offensive skills and keep our methods for developing the defensive game.

I go to Europe 10 times and watch and talk to the top coaches. We write a book with a combination of the best from each continent. Then I go and try to talk about the method with the head of development for the CHA and I can't get past the lobby. I am told that our program is competition to the Nike skills program that they have developed.

It is a program with great drills and progressions. The only problem is that offensive skills and creativity aren't developed using drills.

Parents are so worried now about safety that they are burying volunteers with beuracracy. In our school we now have to get a signed letter every time the teams play an away game. This letter must tell everything about the trip. A season schedule used to suffice.

We have all of our players wearing every type of hockey protection possible and then don't call boarding or charging, and don't allow hitting until the hormones are raging.

Now the kid's go out to only hit, versus players who can't handle the puck and are only used to going around pylons. Kid's get hurt all of the time now. In past years hardly anyone got hurt. I played up to the minor league level (old U.S. league) and can't remember any teammate getting a separated shoulder from hockey. Stitches, broken noses, lost teeth but not blown shoulders and knees. In kid's hockey no one got hurt.

My bantam team played a tournament two weeks ago and three players got injured when a much larger team from Trail B.C. decided that it was unacceptable for this little A team to be beating their AAA team and they ran us. Three of their players were thrown out for hitting from behind.

Only one boy in my grade seven class of 28 plays hockey. About 10 boy's and girl's play soccer both indoor and outdoor.

The CHA has their big meeting in Toronto and gets people like Dryden, King, Kingston, etc. to talk and make recommendations. Some of them have never coached kid's hockey and the others have been away from it for over 20 years. They don't ask people like you and I who are in the trenches.

Now they want to have grade 10's play in the same league as grade 12's when anyone involved in the game knows that if you were born in 87 you should only be playing with kid's born in the same year. The size differnce from one year to another is huge.

Towns with small numbers could still combine ages.

I did a hockey school in Vierumaki Finland a few years ago. Teppo Numminem and Jerke Lumme were my assistant instructors. At the end of the school Lumme sais to me; "Tom if the kid's in Canada practiced this way then no one would be able to compete with them. They have so many rinks and so much talent there."

I just finished playing my Sunday morning shinny and when I came out of the dressing room there was a 10-11 year old team on the ice. They had been there for 30 minutes. They were only using one end and the ice was still shinning from the flood. They were doing a pretty good drill, but could't perform it well because they had hands of cement. Then they had to listen to instructions about the next drill. In 15 minutes each kid probably moved for 2 or 3. And the scary thing is that this practice was better than most.

Sorry for rambling on. I am just frustrated that we won't do the obvious and let the kid's play during practice and go away from running professional level practices with beginning level players.

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