Ideas for Minnesota Hockey
Moderators: Mitch Hawker, east hockey, karl(east)
Fun with squirts?
I'll have two separate groups of squirts out on the ice for our Monday Skills Night. My plan to have them spend some time at different stations where they'll be working on a specific skill set, but then I want to take one of the learned skills from that night's session and incorporate that skill into some sort of a competion. Let's say one night we work on puck control & stick handling, I'll set up a relay race where they have to control the puck and stickhandle around a set of cones. Kids like relays. They just think they're having fun, but actually they're working hard, skating as fast as they can and be using puck control skills they just learned.
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Neutron 14
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- Joined: Fri Jan 28, 2005 12:48 pm
For some kids hockey can and should be hard work, there has to be a place for them.
We can't treat everybody the same however, hockey has a built in class system that allows for different levels of players to still play the game. Just because you're a C kid doesn't mean you want to be a A kid, many are quite happy where they are and we should let them. My association in all their wisdom has decided that C kids are there because they don't have the skills to be better (duh) so they decided to make them better. My peewee C team had 60+ hours of practice ice and played 12 games over 4 months and out of 16 kids only 5 signed up to play this year and it was about the same for the other C teams. These kids didn't want to be A level players but it was forced on them, they just wanted to play games and have fun. Many of my kids were on a ski club, honor band, had ccd, or played another sport like basketball or soccer in the winter. Most of these kids play baseball in the summer or do motocross or other things, they don't spend weeks in hockey camp, nor should they just to play a game. Hockey was a social activity like golf or softball is for adults, not their priority. There was no illusion of making a high school team, most knew their hockey lives were going to end sooner rather than later. These are the types of kids that should get a 1-1 practice to game ratio and get maybe 20 games a year.
To often we forget that these are kids and keeping the 12 year old involved at the C level may just make him want to work harder to get better, but if we force it on him and he quits we may have just lost the next Neal Broten to something else. The longer we can keep kids interested the better off we'll all be.
One thing we learned from exit surveys was that kids were a lot less cocerned about winning and losing than their parents were, especially at the 4-6 grade levels. Most kids played or quit depending on if their friends were playing and if they were having fun. If they weren't having fun some just didn't like football, fine there will always be kids like that, others, and this was far more than the first group, quit because they didn't have many friends or classmates on the team with them; "I didn't know anybody" or "all my friends were on another team" were common answers. Keeping kids involved has played big dividends for the high schools in town, all 4 schools are competitve and usually at least 2 are ranked in the top 10 and all have good numbers. Contrast that to hockey where 3 of the 4 schools struggle to put a JV team on the ice and there hasn't been a competitive public school team in a decade.
We can't treat everybody the same however, hockey has a built in class system that allows for different levels of players to still play the game. Just because you're a C kid doesn't mean you want to be a A kid, many are quite happy where they are and we should let them. My association in all their wisdom has decided that C kids are there because they don't have the skills to be better (duh) so they decided to make them better. My peewee C team had 60+ hours of practice ice and played 12 games over 4 months and out of 16 kids only 5 signed up to play this year and it was about the same for the other C teams. These kids didn't want to be A level players but it was forced on them, they just wanted to play games and have fun. Many of my kids were on a ski club, honor band, had ccd, or played another sport like basketball or soccer in the winter. Most of these kids play baseball in the summer or do motocross or other things, they don't spend weeks in hockey camp, nor should they just to play a game. Hockey was a social activity like golf or softball is for adults, not their priority. There was no illusion of making a high school team, most knew their hockey lives were going to end sooner rather than later. These are the types of kids that should get a 1-1 practice to game ratio and get maybe 20 games a year.
To often we forget that these are kids and keeping the 12 year old involved at the C level may just make him want to work harder to get better, but if we force it on him and he quits we may have just lost the next Neal Broten to something else. The longer we can keep kids interested the better off we'll all be.
One thing we learned from exit surveys was that kids were a lot less cocerned about winning and losing than their parents were, especially at the 4-6 grade levels. Most kids played or quit depending on if their friends were playing and if they were having fun. If they weren't having fun some just didn't like football, fine there will always be kids like that, others, and this was far more than the first group, quit because they didn't have many friends or classmates on the team with them; "I didn't know anybody" or "all my friends were on another team" were common answers. Keeping kids involved has played big dividends for the high schools in town, all 4 schools are competitve and usually at least 2 are ranked in the top 10 and all have good numbers. Contrast that to hockey where 3 of the 4 schools struggle to put a JV team on the ice and there hasn't been a competitive public school team in a decade.
Sure goldy but you cant please everybody and if you try you wont please anybody.
Your C team example is a good one but there are many C teams in other programs that have players that want to play thru their high school years and resent the fact that the A team has way more ice time.
We tried once to have a sign up sheet for a 'casual' C team so the people who are turned off by the rigors of traveling hockey would have a spot. Never got enough interest to field a team.
Maybe in larger programs this should be an option and one that would appeal to people.
Kids that quit for the 'friends reason' dont like the game enough to keep playing and there isnt anything you can do about it. They arent going to admit it in a exit survey.
Again, you cant please everybody. After all of these years , I have come to the conclusion that people who quit just dont like it enough to keep playing. If they like it but dont like all the BS that goes along with it, wait for the pond to freeze.
Your C team example is a good one but there are many C teams in other programs that have players that want to play thru their high school years and resent the fact that the A team has way more ice time.
We tried once to have a sign up sheet for a 'casual' C team so the people who are turned off by the rigors of traveling hockey would have a spot. Never got enough interest to field a team.
Maybe in larger programs this should be an option and one that would appeal to people.
Kids that quit for the 'friends reason' dont like the game enough to keep playing and there isnt anything you can do about it. They arent going to admit it in a exit survey.
Again, you cant please everybody. After all of these years , I have come to the conclusion that people who quit just dont like it enough to keep playing. If they like it but dont like all the BS that goes along with it, wait for the pond to freeze.