This article is the second part of the article titled Ten Steps Towards Advancing Hockey in Illinois. The article continues here.
6. Realignment high school hockey with other traditional Winter sports.
One year ago AHAI unveiled its ambitious plan to realign Illinois high school hockey to coincide with other traditional high school Winter sports. I was present at the first meeting; and it seemed to me that it wasn’ t a matter of if this radical change was going to be implemented, but “ when” the change was going to take place.
For anyone who hasn’ t heard of this ambitious plan until now; our governing body AHAI would like to change our current winter hockey season formats of play currently used by our AA midget and high school hockey winter seasons and move towards the successful split season models used by states like Massachusetts and Minnesota.
Known as a high school-midget split hockey season, this plan would, in effect, shorten the high school hockey season by almost 50%, as well as realign high school hockey with other high school winter sports seasons. The new high school hockey season would start sometime in November with the state championship being determined a few weeks sooner than it is currently. During this abbreviated high school season AA and A midget play would cease, allowing travel hockey midget players to participate on their high school hockey teams.
Youth hockey midget play during this period would consist of players who don’ t make the cuts for their high school programs or don’ t go to high schools with hockey programs. These players would continue to play a midget hockey schedule that AHAI calls a midget light hockey season. All Triple-A players would be exempt
from this new format and continue their tier 1 league play as usual. Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, ‘the best laid plans of mice and men tend to go astray’. Since last February little has been mentioned about this change that at the time seemed so imminent.
Rumor has it that AHAI is being pressured to scrap the entire plan. If they were to buckle under this type of irrational pressure it would be great shame, as well as an opportunity wasted.
If implemented, these AA players would have the privilege representing their high schools in a much more competitive league environment during the new shorter high school season. These same players would also be able to compete with their youth hockey AA midget organizations in the fall and spring.
The athletically gifted athletes who participate in fall sports such as football or soccer would not be forced to make the wrenching decision, during their freshman year, of which sport to give up. In a football rich state such as Illinois, too many of our best hockey talent is lost due to the overlapping fall schedule and the excessive length of our hockey season.
7. Restructure spring hockey by introducing small games.
Years ago I was told by a hockey acquaintance of mine that spring hockey was meant to be used as a developmental tool to help improve our youth hockey players skills and knowledge of the game in a less formal and stressful environment than the regular-season. But, how many of you reading this actually believe that the reality of spring hockey lives up to its intended purpose?
It seems to me that spring hockey has evolved into a two-month extension of the regular season with few practices, meaningless hockey games and little or no hope for skills progression with respect to the individual player.
Decades ago European hockey authorities introduced small games hockey theory into their training practices and procedures. This philosophy, embedded so early during young European hockey players’ development have produced many of the great European players that we see in the NHL today. Whether they’ re moving to open ice without the puck or stickhandling in small spaces and traffic, the influence of small games training is clearly noticeable during every NHL broadcast if you know what to look for.
More and more, our governing bodies have been trying to put more emphasis on integrating small games training into our coaches training regiments. And while some coaches have answered the call, many others in our hockey community have not. The reluctance of some coaches to implement small games theory into their regular hockey season is somewhat understandable. Almost every coach has too little ice time and too much to teach before the playoffs roll around during the regular season to have the ability to implement any meaningful small games regimen into their practice schedule.
This is why springtime is the perfect opportunity to introduce 3 on 3 and small games theory for hockey players at all age levels and skill brackets. For those who wish to participate in spring hockey, this should be a time for these young players to get some relief from the pressure of the regular season by having the chance to play a less formal style of hockey with their neighborhood hockey buddies- in an environment that’ s fun!
Small games and three on three leagues have been with us for years, since Rocky Saganiuk brought the idea to Illinois from Canada, but they are currently too few and far between to make a significant impact. Hopefully this will change in the foreseeable future.
What I love about three on three and small games is that there are no coaches telling the player that you’ re doing something wrong or screaming at a young player because they weren’ t in the right place or doing exactly what the coaches wanted at that time.
The beauty of small games, when introduced correctly, is that players actually learn so much more, in what appears to be an informal pond hockey type setting, than they ever could hope to learn in any three seasons of regular spring hockey the way it is currently structured today. This is because each and every player who participates will touch, carry and shoot the puck, 5, 10 or maybe even 20 times more during an average session than they ever did in a regularly structured league hockey game.
These uncomfortable small areas, in which players are forced to compete, force each and every player to establish new and higher-comfort levels, thereby very quickly raising their individual skills and quickness, as well as their knowledge of the game. This very effective time tested method of self teaching, pays huge dividends later on during a players development years.
8. Cooperation.
One thing that has always bothered me about youth hockey in our state is the lack of cooperation at the organizational level. Not just the lack of cooperation within the organization, but also between our youth hockey organizations as well.
One thing that has always bothered me about youth hockey in our state is the lack of cooperation at the organizational level. Not just the lack of cooperation within the organization, but also between our youth hockey organizations as well.
This lack of cooperation begins during the tryout process at the beginning of each season. Individual organizations will spend considerable time and effort promoting and advertising their programs for large turnouts before tryouts begin. Unfortunately, after all the roster spots are filled the unlucky players and families who are left behind are usually left to fend for themselves; scrambling, often unsuccessfully, to find another program to roster with before it’ s too late. Sometimes these unfortunate players get lucky and sometimes they don’ t; many of these organizations not knowing or even caring what happens to them once the final cuts have been made.
These organizations have a larger responsibility; to assist each of those players, to the best of their ability, to help find alternative programs before it’ s too late. I would like to think this is being done right now, but in the ultra competitive, cutthroat environment of travel hockey of our state; it’ s highly unlikely that any significant change in inter-organizational cooperation will come anytime soon.
But it’ s not only inter-organizational cooperation that needs improvement its intra-organizational cooperation as well. At this level the lack of cooperation has more to do with the interaction amongst the coaches, as well as the direction and leadership of the hockey director. In too many cases, once the coaches are hired there is little or no effort to coordinate the practices in tandem with other coaches within the program or even establish minimal and reasonable goals or guidelines to help develop individual players.
While the more qualified coaches do a wonderful job developing their talent during any one season, more often than not these coaches are left handing their players over the following year to less qualified and skilled coaches who usually find a way to unravel all that was accomplished the previous season. There’ s an old saying in coaching: The coach who gets the benefit of your coaching is always next year’ s coach.
9. Establish a quality assurance program at the organizational level.
Wikipedia defines quality assurance as: the systematic monitoring and evaluation of various aspects of a project, service or facility to ensure that standards of quality are being met. In this service driven economy of ours, quality assurance or QA as it is known, is a fact of life for any business looking for an edge to stay in business. Unfortunately, this doesn’ t seem to be the case within the overall sports world or hockey community in our country.
While searching for the most concise definition of quality assurance on the Internet, I thought it might be interesting to Google the phrase “ quality assurance” just to see how many results I would get. If you Google just “ quality assurance” you come up with 29,100,100 possibilities to select from. If you were to add the words sports or hockey to the search results narrow down just a bit.
By typing in the phrase “quality assurance sports” the list is reduced by 29,100,095 to a mere “five” . Of those 5, three are not in English. And finally if you spell “quality assurance hockey”, you come up with a big goose egg, “0” . I tried several other variations with the same result.
I guess quality assurance just really isn’ t that big in the hockey community overall. Is this because quality assurance isn’ t needed in the sport of hockey or because it may prove to many of us that some of our hockey emperor’ s have a lot less clothing on than they would like us all to believe.
Of all my suggestions in this article I am sure this is going to be the most unpopular. Those who are familiar with what quality assurance is supposed to accomplish may perceive this idea as hockey’ s version of Big Brother. If misused or unmonitored, those of you who believe this would probably be right.
With that being said, can any of us really say that overall, the hockey product that we have produced over the years has met or exceeded our customers’ expectations; our customers, being the players and parents who pay the bills? My personal belief is that while we all believe, as hockey coaches and administrators, that we have tried our very best to train and develop our hockey talent, our best just hasn’ t been good enough.
For as many years as youth hockey has been around in Illinois, we should be doing much better than we are today. We are only kidding ourselves if we believe that the modest successes of those hard-working players from our state, who are now reaching higher levels of hockey success beyond high school, will continue in the future. With states such as California, Florida, and Texas just now making the jump to the next level of hockey proficiency, the gap will begin to close rapidly on us if our hockey community chooses to be too complacent.
One-way too assure that the people who are responsible for training our players don’ t continue down this path of mediocrity, is to establish a verifiable quality assurance program at the organizational level that can reassure both players and parents that they’ re getting their money’ s worth. Implementing a radically new change such as this will not be easy. The fiercest resistance won’ t come from those programs that have been offering quality training throughout the years. The loudest cries will come from the organizations with something to hide and especially the coaches who have been bluffing their way through the years, offering substandard training while they feed their own egos and wallets.
A program such as this, if done well, could be a model for the future, for other areas of the country to follow. As far as I know, it’ s never been done before. Why not try it and see what happens? Would we be any worse off than we are today?
10. Establish a voluntary coaching organization to supplement the mandatory training provided by USA hockey.
If Illinois youth hockey ever wants to improve the quality and consistency of its players, it is going to have to improve the quality and consistency of the coaches who train them. While we are all thankful for USA hockey’ s coaches training efforts throughout the years, it just hasn’ t been enough to attain a high level of overall hockey proficiency to gain any significant ground on the hockey powers such as Minnesota, Massachusetts and Michigan.
The only way to properly build our coaching resources, as well as maintaining them, is to establish a voluntary supplemental coaching organization that will provide quality on and off ice instruction on a regular basis, that can focus on the deficiencies and specific needs of our coaches here in the state of Illinois. USA hockey’s coach’s cookie-cutter, one size fits all training, does not even begin to scratch the surface of the training needs of our coaches. If we really care about the future of youth hockey in our state we are going to have to do nothing less than reinvent the hockey coaches training wheel.
For years we have all heard the complaints from every corner of our hockey community about the quality (or lack of quality) of just about everybody and anybody who’ s involved with hockey in our state. But ultimately, the reason we will succeed or fail in the future as a hockey community won’ t be because of our players athletic abilities, or the hard-working efforts of our governing body and hockey administrators; our ultimate success or failure will rest (as it always has in the past) squarely on the shoulders of our coaches’ ability to train and develop all of our hockey players, at every level, to the best of their abilities.
Currently underway, is a grass roots effort to establish a coaching organization that all of you will be hearing more about in the near future. For those of you who wish to be involved – now is the time! We can all sit back and do nothing, continuing to whine and complain about the state of youth hockey Illinois. Maybe I am just being naïve, but I truly believe that the vast majority of our hockey community is looking for a reason, maybe just like this, to change the status quo and create something better for all of us involved in youth hockey, especially those wide-eyed youngsters who dream of NHL and Olympic glory.
If you truly care about and are concerned with the current state of youth hockey in Illinois, let your voice be heard by emailing me at paul @neckuphockey.com or leaving a comment below this article.
About the Author
Paul O’Donnell writes a syndicated column called Hockey from the Neck up for Chicagoland’s Hockey Stop Magazine and is currently coaches for Robert Morris University in Chicago. If you wish to read more of Paul’s articles, you can find them on his website.
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