I’ve told the story about many of my struggles coaching junior hockey. These 2 articles highlight a big one.
I provided a culture playbook, definitions, and 4 simple core values.
They weren’t remembered or studied or cared about.
This summer at camp I’ve made some adjustments to how I teach.
And by some I mean it’s night and day.
Call it growth…
If you want the players to take notes AND reference them on occasion and maybe even commit some to memory… Gamify that shit.
We’ve been teaching concepts and terms they’ve never heard of… From high agency off the ice to speed differential on the ice, it’s all new to them.
For it to go in and stick, they simply can’t do what my junior players did and ignore it.
So today, we played the Heads Up game. We split them into 2 teams, called one up facing the corner of the room. We threw a term up on the TV and their teammates had 3 chances to help them guess the correct term.
We also told them that we would keep playing this game at random intervals throughout the summer and the score would carry over until the very end.
This is a better system than I had before. This will get them to give the fucks that weren’t being given when I didn’t gamify it for my last team.