Inside Coaching Hockey

2 Inside Coaching Hockey by Richard K. Bercuson Richard K. Bercuson, 2010, Some Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-9809613-1-7 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/deed.en or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. You are free to share: to copy, distribute and transmit the work. Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work The Ottawa District Hockey Association fully endorses "Inside Coaching Hockey" as a valuable resource. However, the ideas, opinions, and suggestions presented in this book are entirely those of its author, Richard K. Bercuson. They do not necessarily reflect either the views or any official stance of the ODHA. Cover design by Shannon King Inside Coaching Hockey 3 Table of contents Chapter Page Warm-Up 4 1 The Coach as Kleptomaniac 7 2 How kids learn 10 3 Stages of skill acquisition 16 4 Skill acquisition progressions 21 5 Drill design for the mind: Types of drills 25 6 Drill design for the mind: The nitty gritty 30 7 Drill design for the mind: Getting creative 33 8 KTPs and F.I.T. 36 9 Drill progressions 42 10 The famous Rule of 3s 48 11 Control-Intervention-Feedback 52 12 "And now for something completely different..." 57 13 LOGs and SAGs 63 14 SAGs Plus! 69 15 In-betweens 76 16 Practice preparation 78 17 The practice template 80 18 The practice variety pack 86 19 The not-so-itty-bitty details 89 20 Half the ice - Twice the planning 91 21 Half-ice solutions 94 22 Half-ice templates 97 23 Planning the plan 101 24 Segmenting the season 104 25 Inside the segment 107 26 The coaching staff 112 27 Orchestrating the bench 115 28 Player evaluation 120 Overtime 126 Acknowledgments & About the author 128 Inside Coaching Hockey 4 Warm-up A Coach’s Credo: Coaching, like teaching, is a sacred trust. It is not so much the imparting of knowledge as giving, sharing, and guiding. A coach can create hope from despair and triumph from dejection. A coach can transform the mundane into excitement. A coach is empowered to help the child do what could not be done, should not have been done, and would not have been done. Good coaches seem to share one key characteristic: the joy of teaching kids. After a season with such leaders, players will have set aside losses, slumps or personal disappointments. What they remember is how the coach treated them. They know instinctively, without skill-testing or evaluation reports, if they learned anything. That can range from specific skills to tactics to simply how to function on a team as a team. It should include, too, (or most importantly in the eyes of many) learning how to become a responsible citizen. Players don’t need to be told by parents or anyone else if their coaches were good ones. They know if it was a positive experience. They feel ready for the next season even as the previous one is waning. The summer can’t slide by quickly enough. Whether the next season’s preparation includes hockey schools, physical training, other sports or just resting, youngsters will continue to want to play so long as their coaches are enthusiastic, communicative, knowledgeable, and helpful. The truth is, the vast majority of coaches have exactly those characteristics. If they didn’t, their motivations to coach kids would be misplaced and likely they wouldn’t last long. Besides, who’d want to spend hours each week with someone else’s kids in what is often a pressured, fast-paced environment? While great coaches are mostly nature’s gift, plenty more can be nurtured. All they need is to like kids, love hockey, revel in teaching, and want to learn themselves. It’s not a tall order since the first two are usually a given, the third grows on them, and the fourth soon becomes important if they want to improve. There aren’t many coaches I’ve come across over the decades whom I’d describe as not belonging in coaching. What often happens is that coaches, like people in any setting, sometimes take the simplest, most expedient path to tasks. It might be by falling back on time-worn drills or tactics. It might be due to external pressures from associations, parents or peers. It’s often because they don’t know better, haven’t searched for alternatives, or there’s no one (like a mentor) to provide advice or help. What great coaches do This isn't a trade secret. Great coaches are creative and innovative. They investigate, plan, and act. These are the ones who do their research and homework and are inquisitive to a fault. Yet the gap between great coaches and ordinary ones isn’t that wide. To bridge it, coaches need some tools and people to help them. Inside Coaching Hockey 5 Coaching minor hockey is not for the faint of heart. It is the one team sport that feeds off its own emotions with barely a timeout to breathe. The sheer flow of the game and the inordinate number of events, shall we say, occurring in a single shift are staggering to count. To someone seeing a game for the first time, it must seem like chaos. Players fly up and down the ice, usually in the same direction, sometimes smacking the object as if no one really wants it. They clamber over the boards (or jam up at the doors) and join the fray seemingly at random. Meanwhile, behind the bench stand adults who gesticulate or shout or scribble on bits of paper with strange markings on them. They orchestrate what would best be called a jumbled jam session of uncoordinated out-of-tune musicians. The most challenging sport Hockey isn’t just challenging to coach. It’s the most difficult of all team sports to coach. There are no outs. There are no long stoppages to chat with players. There is no time to think in a game, just react better or worse. Getting kids on and off the bench effectively is a science. Ask anyone coaching kids under age 12 about that adventure. Being able to communicate with youngsters in less than ten seconds and send the right message is practically an art form. These days, with players wearing cages and mouth guards, communication is mostly one way, from coach to player. Expecting a dialogue within a decent time frame is fantasy. Games aren’t just scheduled; they’re exact. A country’s transportation system would do well to watch the efficiency of game management. The coach gets just a few minutes to have the team warm-up on the ice. In some cases, it’s as little as two or three minutes. Between periods, perhaps a minute. When the allotted time is over, no matter the score, no matter the time left on the score clock, the game ends. The doors for the resurfacing machine monster are swung open nary a moment after the last player has left the ice. Within this tight framework, minor hockey coaches have to implement plans and follow up on tactics. They need to react not just quickly but ahead of the play as it happens. There isn’t a single team sport in which coaches have so little time to do so much and still control their emotions. This is exclusive of a minor hockey game’s current bizarre rule structure in which youngsters are subjected to nearly identical rules as the professionals. Only the length of games differs. How does the minor coach soften the blow of a child getting a 10-minute misconduct, which in effect is nearly the entire playing period? The games may be shorter, but penalty length, types of infractions and rules such as offside and icing are virtually identical to the adults. The expectations in games are often out of whack with what a child is capable of handling. Then there is the puck, 4 oz in the Initiation Program for 4-6 year olds, regulation 6 oz for everyone else. Now the minor coach is trying to figure out how to get his ten year olds to clear the defensive zone by shooting “high and hard” off the glass. Except with this age group and an adult-weighted puck, the kids can neither shoot high nor hard anywhere, let alone off the glass. In the only major team sport that has failed to adapt its playing object to children, the coach has to come up with game time remedies that will work. Inside Coaching Hockey 6 If a hockey coach’s practice is slow, players freeze. Generally, practices are under the same time constraints as games. Icetime is precious and expensive. Whereas in some sports you can dawdle on a court or field for a few moments, in hockey, too much down time chills the muscles, bores the kids, and kills the enthusiasm. Everyone knows more As if any of that wasn’t enough, hockey’s niche in Canadian culture is vast and deep. Even those who’ve never played or coached believe they know what should be taught, when, and how.

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