Life Update: I’m in Dallas, Texas running a summer player development camp for the next 2 months. Last year I spoke remotely at it, this year I’m tripling down on that group.
How is it so far?
It’s hotter than Bedard’s mom down here… (it’s okay to laugh at jokes)
Expect some looks at what we are teaching on and off the ice for members only
You can take me seriously now because I’m ‘coaching’ again, I know some of you were worried…
I’ll give you Day 1 for free.
Day 1. Written a few things about Day 1 in my coaching iterations year to year:
2 changes I’ve made:
Unlike some with an online platform, I practice what I write about, here is what we did:
Brief intro of coaches, cracked some jokes, let kids introduce themselves and they we asked 2 random questions to get them relaxed in the new environment.
Example Question: What is your spirit animal?
As a theme of how they were speaking about themselves made an appearance, I interjected at 2 points during the intros to teach 2 mini-lessons:
Short Lesson on Intention vs. Desire
Short Lesson on Self-Limiting Talk
These came up organically as players introduced themselves and answered questions.
Speed Dating Game-
S/O to Kevin for the suggestion a year ago. Here’s how we did it:
Split players into 1’s and 2’s. 1’s stayed at their tables, 2’s moved around the room. Each pair had 30 seconds to find a commonality. Pairs weren’t allowed to have the same thing in common with anyone else. The first few are easy and then 30 seconds becomes a challenge to find common ground that doesn’t repeat towards the end.
Pre-Ice Session
Tug of War Best of 7
Intro to Breath Work and Foot Warmup
Surveyed players on one major thing they’d like to improve this summer. Started working those comments into the why for some of the games we ran on Day 1.
On Ice Session
Tag warmup. Some players wanted to work on edgework and angling.
Rondos (Surveyed players wanted to focus on playing in tight areas, decision-making themes)
1 flow drill (CLA slappies can fuck off that I ran 1 drill…)
Small area games the rest of the time.
The teaching emphasis was on building space for teammates.
Skating at teammates check to create space for him (builder movement)
Fill player reading off teammate movement to recognize and get into the space they created for them.
Stick picks, switches, and making the unrewarded run.
Day 1, in the books.
Awesome stuff. What are the age group you are coaching ? What breath-work did you introduce them too ?
Good stuff. Just catching up on some of this. I like where this is going. I'm looking out my window right now at what I hope can become 'The Athletic Club @ GLC'.
Some day that could turn into a 'development camp'. For now I'm just trying to get enough people in my community on board to try and set up a space for kids to come play ball hockey. Then we go from there.
Glad I started 'catching up a bit'. Lot of real life stuff has me in that place today where you wonder what in the eff you're doing and if anything even makes sense.