Over-speed training simply means pushing yourself beyond a speed where you are “comfortable.” Going through the motions at a comfortable pace won’t help you progress as a skater. Many of the coaches I talk to seem a bit overwhelmed by the subject of over-speed training, thinking it is a grandiose topic that’s over their heads. While there are great depths you can take the topic, you can begin to incorporate over-speed training into your practices with just a good grasp on the fundamentals of skating.
“How you do anything is how you do everything.” -source unknown
This is a great quote, and one relevant to everyone in the hockey coaching field. With so much happening on the ice, it’s often easy to overlook small bad habits that creep in to teams. Eliminating these habits will not only make you a stronger team, but also help form players with better character.
In part 3 of 3, we cover tips for coaches during tryouts. It’s no secret tryouts can be one of the most stressful points of the season. With a few well-planned parts to your sessions, you can eliminate a lot of the difficulty typically associated with this time of year.
This post is part 2 of a three-part series revolving around tryouts. These posts will cover tryout tips for players, parents, and coaches. This focus is on tips/thoughts for parents. Parents have one of the most difficult parts of the process – they’re utterly helpless, everything is in the hands of the player and coaches.
Disclaimer: These “tips” for parents come from a coaching perspective. They’re not meant to be “scolding” in any way – instead, they’re simply to help give a coaches perspective on some common interactions during one of the most difficult times of the season.
During the tryout times, I get a lot of players who ask me about the tryout process. Over the past year or so, I’ve written several pieces about tryouts (just search this blog for “tryouts”), but I wanted to give players (hopefully some of my own trying out as well) a couple quick tips for entering tryouts.
Well, it’s official – this year’s contest topped the charts with over 1.2 million shots logged from around the world! Wow – I would have never guessed a few years back when we started running this it would ever get this big! Great to see everyone working so hard to reach their goals….which is the true purpose of this contest.
Some may have been wondering where I’ve been for the past few weeks, and why the post consistency has decreased. I’ve been heavily involved in taking the ice down and re-installing it at our local rink. This weekend I’m actually up in Minnesota watching an NAHL tryout. As I sit in the lobby observing about a hundred kids coming in (some I’ve coached, some I’ve coached against), one thing is very apparent….everyone is on pins & needles. This is the final tryout camp for one of the teams in the North American Hockey League. Players enter with the hopes of making a high-level US-based junior team. Parents wait nervously in the stands and lobby, sometimes pacing back and forth, chain smoking, or just sitting there fidgeting. It’s fun hockey to watch because every player on the ice is competing. There are some obvious cuts and some obvious returning players, but the rest remains very close in talent. Many perceptions of junior hockey tryouts are they serve primarily as a fundraiser for the organization. I suppose if you broke it down, it’s easy to see how that would be an easy conclusion to jump to. Just for fun, here are the numbers of the camp I’m watching:
100 players (approximately) x $250 each player = $25,000
Ice expense of approximately 25 hours at $150/hr = $5,250
Total approximate profit: $19,750 – not bad for a weekend’s work! No matter what the dollar amount equals out to, my main hope is the players attending are being treated honestly and fairly. Let me make it clear by saying I am NOT saying they aren’t being treated fairly/honestly. I hope that when players attend ANY junior tryout (or any other level tryout for that matter), the coaching staff is having a completely honest conversation with the players as opposed to stringing them along to get more money out of them. Good luck to all the skaters on the ice this weekend!
I wanted to let everyone know about NiceRink’s FireCracker Sale. I’m sure most of you already know about NiceRink, but if you don’t, they make backyard ice rinks and have just about everything when it comes to personal hockey stuff…nets, pucks, safety netting (for your garage in the summers), plus all the backyard rink stuff you could ever need. If you know what you’re looking for, act now and you can save 15% – pretty sweet deal. Just click the banner below for the details.
Harry from Kingston was kind enough to share a recent penalty killing handout he distributed to his Peewee team. Click the link below to download the PDF version of his handout:
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Bad Habits to Eliminate
Tags: habits, youth hockey, youth hockey coaching
“How you do anything is how you do everything.” -source unknown
This is a great quote, and one relevant to everyone in the hockey coaching field. With so much happening on the ice, it’s often easy to overlook small bad habits that creep in to teams. Eliminating these habits will not only make you a stronger team, but also help form players with better character.
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