Hockey Dad

by Bob Mckenzie

  3. Improve Individual Skating and Skills Development.

  This one is pretty obvious. As a coach, you are responsible for making sure the kids are better skaters, puck handlers and shooters at the end of the season than at the beginning. While skill development happened every time we took to the ice for practice, we tried to designate at least one practice a week to just skills. We often brought in outside help who specialized in power skating or puck handling or off-ice conditioning. I had a high-performance trainer, Dennis Lindsay, to introduce the kids to rudimentary plyometrics and core work. I had Jari Byrski-my wonderful Ukrainian friend and a true character who has worked with countless Toronto-area kids over the years, including so many that have made it in the NHL (Jason Spezza, Brent Burns, Wojtek Wolski, among others)-to work on skating and puck handling in his fun-infused fashion.

  4. Teaching Team Concepts, Strategies and Systems. Yes, there's that dirty word again-systems. There are those who will tell you it is evil incarnate in minor hockey. If that's all you're doing for instruction, shame on you. But if you are ensuring the kids are having fun on and off the ice, extolling the proper life values, giving them well designed personal improvement programs for skills etc., there is nothing wrong with teaching them how to break out of their zone, forecheck, regroup, work a power play, set up a penalty kill, block shots and take away passing or shooting lanes. In other words, teaching them how to play like a team.

  Like anything in life, it's all about balance and finding the right emphasis at the right time.

  In many ways, hockey is a complex game. In so many others, though, it really couldn't be simpler. It doesn't matter if it's the NHL or minor peewee AAA, it's basically the same game. I am not so naïve to believe coaching a minor peewee AAA team is the same as coaching in the NHL. Being around the NHL every day, I know that as well as anyone.

  But the same basic principles of the game still apply.

  We gave each kid a different slogan to memorize that related to a specific aspect of the game and how we thought it should be played. If an NHL team were to successfully execute the majority of these slogans on any given night, that team would win a lot more than it loses:

  Keep your feet moving.

  Shoot the puck.

  Pucks and bodies to the net.

  Support the puck all over the ice, no fair fights (in other words, always try to outnumber the other team in battles for loose pucks).

  Short, hard shifts.

  Don't be afraid to make a mistake.

  Fight from and/or get on the right side of the puck (back-check like your hair is on fire).

  The puck moves faster than anyone can skate, head-man the puck.

  No turnovers at either blue line.

  Discipline, discipline, discipline; initiate, don't retaliate.

  Play the game, not the scoreboard (that is, don't get discouraged if you're down three and don't get complacent if you're up three, just play the same way every shift). Always make yourself a threat to score a goal.

  Say nothing when you lose; say less when you win. It's all about respect. For your teammates, your coaches, your parents, your opponents, yourself and the officials.

  There is an old saying in hockey that goes something like this: "What goes on in the dressing room stays in the dressing room."

  If you are going to coach kids' hockey, DO NOT embrace that slogan. If you do, you are asking for trouble. The dressing room is not Las Vegas and these players are not adults.

  As difficult as some parents can be by being overly involved and interfering when you are coaching, the parents ultimately have the right to know what goes on behind closed doors with their kids. There must be a high level of transparency. And that is for your own protection as much as anything.

  As a coach, you must be aware of what is going on at all times in your dressing room. It's important for kids to develop some independence and not feel like there is someone watching over their every move-the dressing room needs to feel like it is "their" place-but a common mistake many minor hockey coaches make is to leave their players unsupervised in the dressing room for too long. You need to know if your kids are locker-boxing (pounding each other in their helmeted heads with their gloves on) or if kids are being picked on or harassed. Or whatever. I don't have to tell anyone reading this book how cruel kids can be and how the mob mentality can take over if you permit it. All of that is the head coach's responsibility as much as teaching them how to play the game.

  As for the playing hockey part of coaching, I've always believed you don't ask players of any age or caliber to win.

  You don't ask them to score goals or prevent them. It's the old journey versus destination thing; the focus should be on the process as opposed to the result. Scoring goals and getting wins are the end result. You have to teach them all the little things-the journey, if you will-which are required to score or prevent goals. I never asked or expected the kids to win. I asked them to work hard and embrace the values, skills and concepts they were taught.

  On the nights they did that, it was the most gratifying experience one could imagine. Other nights, well, maybe not so much gratifying as it was intensely challenging. That, however, is the magnet pull of coaching. If it was easy, they would call it being in the media.

  Now, getting players to execute all of that with any degree of consistency? Well, that's something else entirely and, boy, did I find that out the hard way in my first year as a head coach.

  19: Tough Love and Learning Our Lessons the Hard Way

  I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN my first year as head coach was going to be a challenge when I ran afoul of the Whitby Minor Hockey Association before the team had even been picked.

  Tryouts were in April. The WMHA rule was a coach couldn't release any players until after the second tryout.

  My problem was that the second tryout ended exactly thirty minutes before I was scheduled to be on the air at TSN. Not at TSN, on the air at TSN. It was going to be a play at the plate just to finish the tryout, never mind release players after it, and get to work on time.

  Now, I am nothing if not a practical man. I had to find a way to cut ten or twelve kids instantaneously after that second tryout. But the association also had fairly firm guidelines on how releasing players could be done-one-on-one meetings; letters; or posting helmet numbers (never names) assigned during tryout registration. I didn't have time for any of that. So I came up with my own idea, which, quite frankly, I thought was ingenious.

  With about twenty minutes left in the ninety-minute try-out, I divided the kids on the ice into two groups. One was larger than the other. I took the smaller group at one end; the other coaches took the larger group at the other end. I ran a few drills and then gathered the kids at my end, explained my time constraints and how this may be unconventional, but they were being released. They went to the dressing rooms, where they got changed while the remaining kids finished the tryout. As the kids who were cut left the dressing room, I had Ron Balcom, the team manager, give them a letter saying I would be happy to meet one-on-one with any parent or player at any time to explain my decision, but not now, not at this moment.

  Personally, I thought it was just about the best way to cut kids. None of the boys seemed to have any problem with it (kids rarely do, but more on that later). They were able to get changed and leave the rink without having to deal with those kids who didn't get cut. And I got to work on time. Barely.

  But someone didn't like it. I caught hell from the association and was told in no uncertain terms not to do it again. All right, fine, although it only underlined what I have often subscribed to in life-it's easier to get forgiveness than permission.

  Nothing came easy in that minor peewee (twelve-year-old) year, for me or the kids.

  It was the year body contact was introduced for these players. While there is always great debate on when is the best time to introduce contact in minor hockey, I can only say from personal experience that it's definitely not when the kids are twelve. Yet
that is the standard in minor hockey in Canada.

  It's been my experience that at the age of twelve, the size difference, in both height and weight, between the biggest players and smallest players is greater than at any other age. So I would say the potential for injury is far greater at twelve. It's also the age when many of the kids are going through puberty and their hormones are absolutely raging out of control. I personally prefer bringing in contact at age ten, the way it was done with Shawn's age group in a pilot program. But that's just me.

  Bill Carroll, the former NHLer who won four Stanley Cups with the New York Islanders and Edmonton Oilers, would agree. Bill is a good friend. His son Matthew (who plays for the Toronto Rock in the National Lacrosse League) is the same age as Mike, and Bill's youngest son, Marcus (who plays for Owen Sound of the Ontario Hockey League), is the same age as Shawn. Our boys played lacrosse together and hockey against each other. I coached against Bill in minor peewee as he was behind the bench of the Ajax-Pickering Raiders and former NHLer Bobby Lalonde was one of his assistants.

  Bill and I used to joke that in minor peewee they should change the name of the game from "hockey" to "hit" because that's all the kids focused on. Some games you could have played without a puck and the kids wouldn't have noticed.

  Well, that wasn't quite true of my Wildcats. Remember that part about puberty? The kids on my team, for the most part, were very late to that party. This group of '86s had always been fairly competitive within their age group. But it became apparent early in the minor peewee season that wasn't going to be the case. Our kids-including Mike (maybe especially Mike)-appeared to be physically overmatched in just about every regard.

  Bill Carroll's Ajax-Pickering team steamrolled us early that season. They were so much faster and physically stronger. They ran us out of the rink on repeated occasions. As an NHLer, Bill was the quintessential defensive specialist but he coached the kids exactly opposite to the way he played. His team played run and gun and, boy, did they run and gun us. We even lost the Rum Cup that year. That was just a little inside joke between Bobby Lalonde and me. Both of us like a sip of the demon rum now and again, so we talked about putting a bottle on the line for each game. Hence, our games against each other became known as the Rum Cup.

  Puberty apparently wasn't an issue in Peterborough. The Borough Boys, who used to be the league doormat but were now a dominant team, had all grown up. They were huge. And mean. They looked and played like a men's team and, believe me, it was like men against boys in our games with them. I never saw any of this coming, neither did the kids. Their reaction, as twelve-year-olds, was understandable but not what I would necessarily deem acceptable. They basically shut down-mentally, emotionally and then physically. Once they realized they were, for the most part, physically overmatched, the attributes they did possess (puck skills, hockey sense, team play and a decent scoring touch) went right out the window.

  They quickly lost their confidence. Once a kid's confidence goes, it is a long, slippery slope. They became rather timid and skittish, if not downright scared at times, and that, folks, is no way to go through minor peewee AAA and the first year of body contact.

  Were we having fun yet? The losses were piling up. The margins of defeat were not pretty.

  As the head coach, I had two choices. I could accept what was happening, try to keep the kids' spirits up as best I could and we could all take our lumps. You know, relax, it's just a game. Or I could try to come up with a plan, painful as that might be, to fight through the adversity and offer some pushback. The choice was obvious for me-I love a challenge-but in order to do that I was going to have to push the envelope a little. Or maybe a lot.

  Competing is a skill, the same as skating or puck handling, but it's a lot harder to teach because to do it, you have to be a hard son of a gun. You have to get in people's faces, you have to push them and grind and take them out of their comfort zone over and over again so that they eventually become conditioned and confident enough to push back and push back hard. No one likes to go through that learning experience. It isn't fun. So I knew what had to be done, but I also knew it wasn't going to be pretty. Remember, these were twelve-year-old kids, not professionals.

  But you know what? I really thought these kids were worth it. I liked them. They were a good bunch of boys from good families and they liked each other and playing hockey together.

  I don't want to create the sense the kids had no fun. We still had social outings for them. They still had their mini games at the beginning of each practice. They still had lots of horseplay at the rink. As hard as we pushed them, the kids knew we liked and respected them. The fact I knew so many of them and their families so well, from our years of minor hockey and lacrosse together, helped immeasurably. This was one case where being a parent-coach and having familiarity and relationships outside of the rink with a lot of the families was a real benefit. In fact, I couldn't have done it if there weren't already a high level of trust between me and many of the parents.

  Man, did those kids get pushed in practice. Hard. There was lots of skating and even more battling. The three-on-three battle drills down low became unbelievably intense and a regular staple. There was lots of yelling and screaming, most of it from me. Our practices became harder than the games, and that was the idea. These kids simply needed to get much tougher-mentally, emotionally and physically. I don't think anything I ever did was out of pure anger or frustration as much as it was calculated, but that doesn't mean there weren't some times when people thought I was a little, or maybe a lot, nuts.

  In a tournament in Kitchener, we fell behind 6-0 in the first period against a very good Team Illinois squad. They scored a couple of soft goals early and our guys just folded.

  The ice resurfacing was to be done at the end of the first period, but I didn't allow the kids to leave the bench to go to the dressing room for the intermission. I made them all stay seated there, watching the Zamboni go around and around. I literally walked up and down the bench while I figuratively went up and down each player with some really pointed criticism.

  All of this unfolded in front of the spectators, and their parents, in the stands. I don't doubt some of them thought I had gone too far.

  Immediately after that game, though, I went even farther. I took the rare step of meeting with a couple of parents and reading them the riot act. It was my infamous goalie rant. Our goalies, like the rest of the team, had been performing poorly but in this game, they were particularly bad. As anyone in hockey knows, if you don't get a save now and again, it doesn't matter what else you do, you're toast.

  One of the goalies was Kyle Clancy, whose parents, Sue and Dan, were friends of ours. Kyle was part of a group of five or six kids who played AAA hockey together in the winter and rep lacrosse in the summer all the way up. Kyle was a very good lacrosse goalie and a good hockey goalie, too, but like all the kids, his confidence was shot at this point.

  I remember telling his mom, Sue, and the other goalie's parents, as well as the goalies themselves, that what I was about to say wasn't fair, I understand that, but that life wasn't fair. I told them that if life were fair, a goalie's equipment wouldn't cost more than every other player's. I told them goalies get too much credit when a team wins and goalies get too much blame when a team loses. I then told them their kids weren't mentally prepared to play the games, they weren't working hard enough to get better and that if the team had any chance of competing, we needed better goaltending. I told them if their kids didn't prepare better and work harder, I would have to find new goalies in mid-season.

  The part about finding new goalies was a total bluff. I am one hundred percent philosophically opposed to any minor hockey team making a personnel change in mid-season just to get better. That's just not right.

  But for my purposes I had to get our goalies out of their comfort zone and I didn't mind telling a white lie to do it. And I also told the goalies and their parents that night that we would get them some specialized instruction to he
lp them out. Right after that tournament, we got ourselves a very good goalie coach, Bucky Crouch. It's all well and good to rant and rave at kids and parents that they need to be better, but the onus is ultimately on the coaching staff to provide them the tools to do it.

  Then there was a game in Peterborough, where we were trying our best to get out of the Evinrude Centre in one piece against the OMHA minor peewee equivalent of the Broad Street Bullies. The Petes were a nasty bit of business back then with their size and aggression. In this game, some of our kids were competing surprisingly well, but there were still too many passengers. Going into the third period, I did something I had never done before. I sat down five kids and didn't play them a shift for the whole third period.

  Included in the five were some key players who had been with the AAA team since minor novice. My attitude was that taking away only fifteen minutes (or the equivalent of about five shifts) of hockey from a kid is a small price to pay if that kid gets the message to compete harder. The kids didn't like it; their parents didn't either, nor would you expect them to. But there was one parent who lost it. During the middle of that third period, he started yelling loudly and repeatedly at me from the stands: "Put [his kid's name here] on. Put [name of player] on."

  I couldn't believe it. No one could. It was so loud and clear.

  It was embarrassing for me but more for that father and his son, who was among the five stapled to the bench. That specific issue got sorted out with that father after the fact, but it reinforced how this whole notion of pushing the kids hard only works if the parents buy in, too. I had a parent meeting to explain exactly that; that if the parents were always going to give their kids a soft landing at home any time I put the kids' feet to the fire at the rink, I would be sunk as a coach and we would be sunk as a team. For the most part, the parents were great. They understood I wasn't being mean to their kids; I was only trying to teach them to compete.