It’s been a few weeks since my last post. While I typically don’t like to go this long without sharing some content with you, I’ve been extremely busy working on a few exciting projects to be released throughout this year. More information on that in the near future. In the meantime, I wanted to share an article with you that someone sent me a few days ago. I still think the idea of long-term athletic development is incredibly misunderstood and there seems to be a trend to listen to the opinions of a former player, parent, or coach that is pulling their opinion from a fairly limited sample size and usually the over-glorification of an outlier, instead of listening to the pool of experts from various fields that are all championing the more intelligent approach. With that said, it never hurts to have a coach from the highest levels support an idea that we know to be true, yet still have to argue for. Check out the article below. It’s a quick read, so share it with anyone else you know in the hockey world.
Read the article here >> Wanted for NHL: True Athletes
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
UltimateHockeyTraining.com
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Together We Rise: A Campaign for Everyone
Great article, I do believe that a better all around athlete builds a better hockey player. However what do you think of this? After watching some of the Baseball classic namely team Dominican Republic, now I maybe wrong but don’t these guys play huge amount of baseball growing up? I’m sure I’ve seen some footage mentioning he young kids in D.R. Live and breath baseball and they do it everyday. The D.R. Produce quite a few major leaguers, so I was really wondering why they seem to be able to do it and succeed going against what we think should be the right way by playing multiple sports. Any thoughts?
P .S. Red Deer beat out my home town Prince Albert Raiders 4 straight:(
I definately agree with this article that a true athlete will play as many sports as possible at a young age. When I was younger I played baseball, basketball, football and soccer all secondary to hockey. My issue is with the on ice current ADM program that is being taught to the youth hockey players of today. I’ve posted on this site in the past about my dislike for the program and I’m doing as much research as I can to find out all the facts, but the end result is clear that we are developing poor hockey skaters with even worse puck handling skills. The drills on usa hockey’s website ask for six stations per session which means we need six coaches for each session. I don’t know any organization that is going to have six qualified, skilled coaches on the ice at one time to teach these kids. The result is maybe one real hockey coach and four or five fathers teaching our game. 400 dollars an hour is a lot of money to pay for ice to have untrained fathers teaching drills done with poor form and with little feet movement. I don’t believe systems are important to the youth ages however, for the money being paid, the kids should be taught how to play the game. I was already refing hockey when I was a squirt. I played the game and knew the rules. The youth today spend all their ice time doing stations and never get the full ice experience of playing the game in a practice setting. I’m a peewee coach and by the time the kids get to my age group, the can barely skate down the ice, let alone do full ice drills at a fast tempo. Love the website and love reading your articles. Always trying to learn as much about the game and coaching as I can. Thank you
Scott-I don’t know enough about DR to really comment intelligently. With that said…there are a few things to consider:
-Soccer seems to be the sport of choice for most of the world. I’d be curious whether soccer served as an off-season backdrop for ball players in DR.
-One of the major problems in our country is the shift toward over-structured year-round single sport participation and the abolition of “free play”. Playing a lot of “pick up” ball still allows for some of the creativity (psychologically and physically) that is essential for development. I think this is a big piece. We need more pond hockey and less tournament teams!
-Sometimes people succeed DESPITE the system, not because of it. If baseball attracts all of DR’s best athletes, a few are bound to succeed. A big issue with single-sport participation is future injury considerations. The ones that go on to succeed at higher levels may be the tip of the iceberg whereas those that never make it are the massive majority lurking beneath the surface.
These are all just questions I have. Obviously I’m speculating, but these are things that warrant some consideration before interpreting this type of information one way or the other.
Hi Steven-This post wasn’t really meant to highlight USA Hockey’s ADM model in anyway, but I can appreciate your perspective. I’d encourage you to continue reading about the thought process that went into developing the ADM as well as the age-specific guidelines and how they change for players at different levels. I’m not exactly sure which age group you’re referring to with the 6 station idea, but you’re 100% right that most organizations won’t have 6 qualified coaches one the ice at one time, at any age level. That said, I don’t think you need qualified coaches to run some of their stations. The idea is to let the kids develop through exploration; this is an extremely powerful teaching tool for young kids. As I mentioned in my previous post, kids don’t have that opportunity anymore. Everything is structured and THAT impairs development in a big way. Even if you didn’t set up stations, it’s impossible for one incredible coach to refine the skating and/or puck handling skills of 15 players (or whatever the team is) at once. And it’s rare that the best coaches are at the youngest levels anyway so I don’t think much is lost in the way of instruction at this level (at least from what I’ve seen in our area. yours may be different). Honestly, I don’t think kids need full ice experience before peewees and it’s okay that they enter this age group without a deep understanding of full ice play. That’s an appropriate age to start teaching and developing those things. I think the general mindset in youth sports in our country is too rushed; everyone wants the kids to play a game that resembles what they see the pros play. The ADM is powerful because it provides age appropriate guidelines to progress players to the highest levels; it appreciates the development process and delivers the right stimulus at the right time, opposed to force feeding “advanced” concepts to under-prepared kids.
I definitely agree that participating in a lot of different sports will create a much more well rounded athlete than focusing on a single sport. But, do these other sports need to be organized by adults and competition focused to meet this need? It seems that kids generally want to get out and play all kinds of sports. My 12 year old only plays competitive, organized hockey but on any given day he also plays basketball, soccer, football and lacrosse. He rides his bike, climbs trees, plays tag, swims … you get the idea. How are people stopping kids from becoming well rounded athletes? A lot of my son’s friends go straight from a pressure cooker hockey season to a pressure cooker baseball or lacrosse season. Does that make them more well rounded athletes than my son? Some of these kids’ parents are a little judgmental that our son doesn’t have a “second sport.” I’ve been wondering about this for a while and would really appreciate your perspective.
Steve-Your concerns with a “pressure cooker” youth sports environment are in line with mine and I’d tend to agree with you that moving from one over-coached scenario to another is certainly not optimal from a psychological development perspective. That said, I think there would still be some value in playing multiple sports (albeit in far from perfect environments) from purely a movement, coaching style, and team role diversity perspective.
I’ve noticed over the last few years, as I’ve written more on athletic development, that there seem to be really strong feelings about the “right” way to do things from people that really don’t understand the magnitude of the recommendations. It may be possible to drill more skill development into a young athlete if they’re heavily coached, one on one, in the same sport, year-round. This, however, would be the exact recommendation I would give if someone asked “how can I guarantee that my son/daughter will be riddled with injuries and/or quit playing in high school?” This approach leads to early successes and later under-achievers. As I’ve said in the past, you win the race to the wrong finish line here. There’s a delicate balance between fostering healthy psychological, physical, social, and athletic development, while also ALLOWING (note I didn’t say FORCING) the athlete to develop a passion for the game. I think most people volunteering their time in youth sports have positive intentions, but a fairly poor application. I believe we’re in the midst of an opportunity for a significant shift in our approach to youth sports, and hope that those on the front lines keep an open mind to recommendations from folks like USA Hockey and start to understand the totality of the influence that their decisions will have on the development of their youth athletes.
Hi Kevin,
This just came on CBC News in Canada a couple weeks ago, which kind of answers the question about why DR has so many Baseball stars. Basically the young kids feel their life depends on making the big leagues. It’s a really good video article. Here’s the link:
http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/ID/2386426775/
Thanks for sharing this Scott.