Where the Future Meets the Past

A bit about myself and where my passion for hockey stems from. I have always loved hockey and played at a level where I was scouted for Junior “A“ team in the early 80's. It was a brief conversation as I was 5ft 7 inches and weighed 122 pounds. This experience was my first understanding at how wrong the game of hockey was that size mattered over the skills that an athlete possessed. Back then, a hockey player could have all the skill in the world but if you did not fit the stereotyped size then you were not making it any further. Now you have to be big to be a goaltender, what’s going on with hockey!!! Coaches now are all teaching the same things, I have created my own book on systems hockey that will be published soon for all you that maybe interested in a different view of hockey. Remember simple is smart, the speed of the game now doesn’t really allow a lot of time to read and react.

Sorry got side tracked, back to being small This experience made me walk away from the game for a few years, until one day my love for the game returned. Instead of wanting to play hockey again, I decided to start coaching. Which I made the decision that no child on any of my teams would be made to feel not good enough based on their size. I would develop their skill as a hockey player and as a young adult.

I am a very methodical person and spent years developing my own unique style of coaching, which I have used to teach kids from the lowest levels of house league hockey to U18 AA playing in a U18 AAA league. I have experience playing in the AA league when I was younger. I use my experience to teach with the learned ability to connect with pretty well any athlete based on the love of the game. Do the teams I have coached developed over the course of the hockey session? You bet they do, otherwise I did not do my job as a coach properly! Do players get to sit on the bench and watch? Not a chance, I believe that you win as a whole team and lose as whole team.

A couple examples of this, I coached one team that had two players that never played hockey before. We would go to the next town over to play games against a team that had picked the kids on their team. Unlike the other teams coach, I had taught the kids to work together and when they were on the ice, they were five kids working as one unit. This style of coaching lead to numerous wins over the other teams who had very skilled players but played the game individually instead of , a team concept.

Another example of my style of coaching is when I coached an AA hockey team that started the season losing 6 games out of 7. When we lost against these other teams the score would be in the double digits, which can be devastating to a team. Instead of getting angry or frustrated with the team, I would encourage them to keep practicing and take the loses as a chance to learn from and do better for the next game. Eventually, our losing streak turned into a 11 game winning streak. The young athletes had developed into strong, skilled players both individually but more importantly as a team. A team that had previously beat us 12 - 2, had to play us at the end of the year, we paid them back by beating them 23 - 2. This was the first time a parent from the other team comes up and shakes my hand, saying it was pretty obvious which team learned how to play hockey this year.

The last example I will share, exhibits what I believe in and strive to teach the athletes. The team I was coaching was at a tournament and we were playing against a team that was well below our level. The opposition coach replaced their only goalie with a forward. I thought this was really heartbreaking for the young goalie, as the coach had no reason to pull him from the game. At the end of the game each coach got to pick the MVP for the other team. I chose to pick the goalie that got taken out of the game. The opposition coach refused to have the goalie named MVP of the game, but I stood my ground and the goalie got the MVP award. I talked to him while shaking hands and told him how important he was to his team. Parents from the opposing team came to me afterwards to shake my hand and tell me I made the right choice.

I wanted to believe that this style of coaching had been weeded out over the years, but having a grandson playing hockey these past few years has informed me that it has not been and probably never will be. So now I am back coaching to try and change this mindset of how hockey should be played one player at a time. You can trust that I will put my heart and soul into building these young athletes confidence and skills so that they can reach their full potential.