Playing With Balance
As you’ll likely discover from my comments in numerous other areas, I’m really big into allowing very young skaters to play as free as birds. Said another way, I’d love for little guys and gals to play wide-open, offensive hockey, at least at first. It’s just great for their skill development (and it probably helps encourage aggressiveness).
At the same time, there has to come a point in their development whereby skaters learn to play with a little more balance. I mean, a typical hockey game ultimately requires them to split their duties between offensive and defensive roles. And, as I’ve described some days ago, this entails the concept of “reading and reacting”.
As an aside here… I’ve always felt that players should be able to skate with certain information — or a theme — in their heads. For example, the higher levels of our game often include tactical matches of skill and wit — with one coach’s X’s and O’s aimed at stifling the other team’s approach to the game. Those X’s and O’s are also often changed a number of times during a game, which means that players might need to correspondingly adjust their approach. And so does the score and the time-remaining change throughout, this requiring players to make similar adjustments (please see “Turning Points” for an example of this).
As for that “balance”… I’m of the opinion that a player should always keep another theme in his or her head, realizing that the very next instant might require a quick change in his or her role — from offense to defense or from defense to offense.
In particular, I’m concerned with the first application, the reaction from offense to defense. For, if (depending on game conditions) more than one or two players go overboard on the attack, there’s the likelihood the rest of the team is going to be caught undermanned if the puck is suddenly lost.
Also, as you’ll discover in more of my writings, the best players tend to be those who can quickest — mentally and then physically — change their roles (or think the game better than others).
