How Many Drills Are Needed Over a Long Hockey Season?
If you happen to be on LinkedIn — but you haven’t engaged in some of their hockey related forums, you really should. Like many other social media sites, there are plenty of great hockey people to be met there. And, at least for me, there are a ton of great ideas that can be gleaned from other hockey players, parents and coaches.
With that, I came across a great question one night that I thought worthy of attention:
“How many different drills do you think need to be implemented during a hockey season?”
Hmmmmm… Ya, it is a great question, but one that I felt was going to take a whole lot more work than just a few lines in a forum to address. So, I’ve decided instead to do the topic justice, by explaining my thoughts here — for my loyal followers.
The reason I jumped on that question was that I could just envision the answers that would soon roll in. I mean, I can see some coaches quoting numbers — like 15, 25, 40, 80, whatever. And I can tell you that none of us would be right if we got hung-up on a number.
What I’m going to suggest instead, is our need to constantly troubleshoot our players’ needs, or continuously help them solve problems.
Ironically, I had a brief conversation with a few of my assistant coaches the previous night after a AAA Bantam practice, not realizing that it actually hinted at some of what I’m going to suggest here.
You see, we’d gone through a tough stretch starting that season, so we’d only begun making progress after also making some roster changes. So I was telling my assistants that we’d just had the best practice ever, and that we should begin growing from there onward.
My coaches and I went back and forth about that for awhile, and then I suggested that, “A time will come when the kids will need a break, and I’ll just blow-up my practice plan for a night and try some wild, crazy things instead.”
And that brings me back to the “hints I’m going to suggest here.”
Picture along with me, that I had a plan for my kids as we entered that summer. And picture again how that plan had to change as we entered the fall. Then, imagine the changes we’d gone through once the roster was upgraded.
Moreover, I said that we’d begun growing from that night’s practice onward. There’s no specific — or even rough — number of drills that could be estimated for completing that task. I just had to design a given practice plan according to the way I saw my kids’ needs on a given night. And, as I suggested above, there would even be a time when I knew the kids had had enough, and they needed something totally off the wall to renew their love of the game.
As an aside… Some might think that a blown-off practice is a huge waste of ice-time. But, I’ll suggest that there’s a far greater danger in not “reading” my players, and in not “reacting” to their on-the-spot needs. And, let me tell you: I have found that one totally off-the-wall practice, spaced just right in their schedule, can oftentimes make the next couple of months worth of practices all the more productive. I truly mean that.
Now, I’m going to let CoachChic.com members in on a four-plus step process I use for designing my lessen plans…
1) Here’s a checklist I use before I begin drafting things. In other words, I have this list of areas of play off to the side as I scratch some rough notes on what I’d like to cover:
Skills: skating, puckhandling, passing/receiving, scoring and body-checking
Team Defense: forecheck, backcheck, numerical situations, D-zone coverage
Team Offense: breakouts, regroups, attack plays, numerical situations
Special: face-offs, powerplay, penalty-kill
Now, not that every single one of those things gets covered in every practice. Of course, a lot of them also get combined on various drills. My real point for scanning that list: so that I don’t forget something important.
2) Long-time members know my penchant for note-taking during games. Among other purposes, I jot brief messages to myself while a game is in progress for things I’ll want to either work on in a practice or discuss with the kids in quieter confines.
For Pre-practice Discussion: As you might realize, some things can’t actually be treated in a drill, but they’re better handled while either shooting the bull or looking at a re-creation on a greaseboard. So, since my kids were in tune to meeting for 10- to 15-minutes prior to every practice, I’d jot my planned topics of discussion up in a corner of a given night’s lesson plan.
For On-ice Work: I never attempted to fix everything discovered in the last game during a single practice. However, I usually could identify one concept that could immediately help the kids, and I’d build a drill around that idea.
3) At this point, I usually only have a batch of scratches on scrap paper. I don’t get to actually plan the practice until I take a look at the very last on-ice session. Repetition and continuity are important to the teaching process, ya know. So, while every practice may be slightly different, a lot must remain constant. Said yet another way… I’d use the last practice as kind of an outline for the new one, and then begin slightly changing things.
4) Very much connected to the last point above, I have for years used something I think school teachers refer to as “blocks” of drills. In other words, I might use a given group of drills for something like agility for a stretch of 4- or 5-weeks, and then I’d substitute that with different drills that still treat the same skill/s. The idea is to get the most out of a drill, but then stop using it before boredom creeps in. This same approach — of teaching in blocks — is actually going on in several different parts of my lesson plan, so that both repetition and my concerns for boredom are being dealt with on a nightly basis.
Outside my degree studies in Physical Education & Coaching, I think one of the best lectures I ever attended was by Dave Dryden (I think it was in Montreal, Canada, at the 1980 NHL Coaches Symposium). There, Dryden suggested we coaches not be “running around stamping out brushfires.” The gist of that approach points to us coaches sticking to an overall plan, and not constantly ditching that plan to fix the latest game problem. As Dryden hinted, if we spend all our time tonight fixing our powerplay, our breakouts will probably falter in the next game, and so on and so on and so on. So, even though I always have planned some brief times to deal with a problem my kids recently had, I’ve never abandoned my overall plan in any given practice.
Finally, I hope CoachChic.com members can now see why I think it’s pretty difficult to name the number of drills we coaches should use over the length of a season. Added to all the input I’ve shared above is the need to constantly up the progressions — or challenges — included in a single drill (which means that one drill evolves into another and another, and so forth). Moreover, I can tell you from experience that players will get some things faster than we think they will, while they’re going to struggle with some drills or concepts we thought they’d get easily. And this suggests that we have to constantly make further adjustments to our lesson plans, either slowing things a bit or picking up the pace.
Make sense?
