Feature Story
Unfocused development
Let’s Play Hockey Columnist
Picture a Detroit assembly line where
thousands of workers contribute in their own area of expertise, but no one has
been told what the final product should look like. Is it a truck, a sports car
or a luxury sedan? Without leadership, each assembly line worker might be the
best in the world, but the result is chaos.
That’s where we are in hockey right now —
chaos. North American coaches have turned the project of offseason
development over to outside experts, most of whom are knowledgable
in their own special area. But they do not have the broader perspective of the
hockey coach to know what the final product is supposed to look like — perhaps
a Sidney Crosby with Alexander Ovechkin power,
driving for a goal.
If we were to ask college hockey coaches,
for example, what assets they look for in prospective recruits — what it takes
to be a dominant college hockey player, what it takes to win — the list might
go something like this: competitiveness, rink sense, skating skill, speed,
agility, stickhandling, shooting, passing. Some would
include strength in this list, others might not —
certainly not the first thing on the list.
Given this, why does so much of the offseason development of a youngster who wants to play
college hockey take place in the weight room? And assuming the college coach
believes some of his current players don’t shoot well enough and some need help
with their skating, why does he just send them off to the strength coach for
six months of the offseason?
In
Much of their strength training is geared
toward skating. Much of ours is geared toward building nose tackles. Europeans
have this belief — strange as it might seem to an American — that shooting
practice can improve shooting skill — on-ice or off. Russian hockey coaches are
like basketball coaches in our country: they teach athletes how to practice
skills.
Actually, American hockey might be the
only sport that doesn’t believe in skill practice for all ages. If a prospect
doesn’t shoot very well at 17 years of age, we send him to the weight room to
get bigger, so he can play like a goon.
While watching the Masters golf tournament and the NCAA Basketball Final Fours for men
and women, did you think those sports require more skill than hockey? Of course
not — especially when you consider the difficulty of performing hockey skills
on skates at super-fast speed, against the best defenders in the world.
For some reason, however, we have a
tradition in American hockey that after a certain age — perhaps 10 years old —
we just work on team skills and do not encourage players to practice individual
skills. High school and college coaches rarely send kids away for the summer
with a book (or a
Ironic, isn’t it, when you consider the
list of assets needed to win.
Players could practice awkward one-timers
or off-balance wrist shots — or shooting the way Russian forwards do when they
skate parallel to (or away from) the goal line rather than toward it.
Defensemen could practice moving sideways down the blue line to avoid getting
shots blocked next winter.
We must also change the tradition that
the only time we practice skating is with a skating instructor. After all, once
a golfer has worked with the pro, there will be hours and hours of individual
practice.
None of this is meant to diminish the
importance of strength training. It is an integral part of skating development
and overall hockey performance as well as injury prevention. But it is certainly
not more important than skating itself, not more
important than sprinting or agility drills or skating-specific jumps. It’s just
one piece of the puzzle.
Until we focus on the entire puzzle —
making sure that all the pieces point toward that finished product we have
pictured — our offseason training is unlikely to
produce the results that the effort should demand.
Given the seasons Ovechkin
and Evgeni Malkin have had,
it is worthwhile to consider how they were developed. As you watch them in the
playoffs, understand that their youth and junior coaches knew exactly what they
were trying to build. Training was planned and focused on that objective at all
times, whether off-ice or on.
No one said, “Go to the weight room. Work
hard. I don’t know if it has anything to do with hockey — just give it 100
percent.”
Jack Blatherwick,
Ph.D., is a physiologist for the Washington Capitals.