3 Principles Atom Minor Hockey Coaches Should Follow
Okay, if anyone thinks they can’t learn something valuable in a discussion about young players, think again. And if we have some high school or Junior coaches as members here, I’m going to suggest this would prove a very worthwhile read for them.
Now, Carol, a Twitter friend from long ago, and a Manager for her youth program’s Atom Division, posed a REALLY tough question for this old coach.
As she put it, “What are the three top principles an Atom minor hockey coach should follow?”
Of course, it would have been easier to troubleshoot a hockey skill problem, or to suggest a solution for some area of team play. Offering what I might consider to be top principles is yet another challenge. Not only that but, my guess is that Carol would likely get lots of very different suggestions had she polled other experienced coaches.
That said, I spent an awful lot of time — thinking long and hard — to arrive at what is to follow.
(Oh, by the way, for those who aren’t familiar with the Canadian age level known as “Atoms”, it’s basically the same as the “Squirt” designation used in USA Hockey.)
1) Give every player a reason to look forward to the team’s next get-together
I’m not so naive as to think there aren’t a lot of things that go wrong in a typical hockey practice or game. In fact, I can’t blame coaches of losing teams for feeling plenty of frustration, and I can also appreciate how difficult it can be to stay positive under such circumstances.
Still, there is a time for everything.
For sure, players need to be pushed and prodded. And when it comes to younger players, I’ve even pretended to be mad at the lot of them.
That out of the way, I choose my parting words VERY wisely. I mean, I actually delay entering my team’s post-game or post-practice lockerroom for about 5-minutes. During that time my kids get to partially undress and I get to gather my thoughts. Oh, there might be nights when I’d like to blast them, and there are surely a lot of nights when I’d like to go into a 20-minute talk — on why we should have done this and how we could have done that. In reality, though, what’s done is done, and the only thing that’s important at this point is our next game or our next practice. So, it seems the most productive thing I can do, as I send the kids on their way, is to give every one of them a reason to look forward to our next get-together.
2) Continually look for “teaching moments”
Over 40-years of coaching, I have a pretty good outline — or checklist — for readying a team. My season’s plan is pretty detailed, and my practices are planned to the minute.
Yet, unusual things happen all the time — during practices, and especially during games. Sometimes it’s a rare circumstance that crops-up during a game, sometimes it comes from a great question posed by a player, sometimes it comes about because of a difficulty experienced by a player, and sometimes it stems from an outstanding play.
No matter, I call these “teaching moments”, and I think they’re worthy of holding a good old fashion bull session. Actually, I sense that my players (young or old) have enjoyed these. Better yet, I sense these kinds of discussions stick with a player for many, many years.
3) Think long-term
No doubt we’d all gain a great deal of satisfaction from seeing some of our players go on to do well at the game’s higher levels. That said, coaches dealing with the youngest players have to realize just how significant their contribution really is to that cause.
On the negative side of things, my work as a skills analyst has me spotting numerous older guys who struggle just because they weren’t helped when they were young. Not knowing their history, it’s often hard to know exactly what went wrong. But my educated guess is that some of their earlier coaches either skipped steps in certain teaching progressions, or they didn’t establish in their players a certain kind of discipline or mentality when it came to skill work.
This brief aside… A lot of years ago I attended a coaching symposium that included a roundtable discussion on skill development. (If it wasn’t so sad it would have been laughable. But…) An NHL executive started by pointing to the other members, suggesting that they had to get the skill development accomplished, because his guys couldn’t practice often enough, what with all their games and heavy travel schedule. The Major Junior coach obviously took exception to that, complaining that he had to concern himself with winning games or he’d lose his job. And so the buck-passing went, all the way down the line, with each level offering its own excuse, and asking the same basic question as the others: Why don’t you guys down below send me skilled players?
I tell that story because I too often hear coaches at the youngest levels make their own excuses — as in, “Oh, my players will get that when they move-up to the next level.” Not so, of course, at least from what those guys at the roundtable had to say.
To my way of thinking, the seeds for great skills and playing smarts should be planted early. And so should the lead-up skills be taught so that players can later skate like the wind, handle a puck wildly, thread perfect passes and fire absolute bullets. Having your players eagerly looking forward to their next team event will help towards that end. Finding plenty of “teaching moments” is going to help young players think the game better. And, thinking long-term tends to help us coaches resolve that age-old win-at-all-costs versus development-first issue.
