Roger Grillo shares his insights on coach and player development.

yeah i think a couple things and this is a this is a really strong push that that i'm driving our group on uh the last couple years and then moving forward and and and the first one is how to deliver skating for young players um i think in my era there was the line skating and the edge work and the the power skating and and so on and so forth and we work very closely with the fins in the swedes so we each country has similar to our setup we actually stole it from them um where we have regional managers so we do crossovers i'll be doing a crossover with the swedish federation here in another month but uh um i'm also a mentor coach for the the um iahf but um when we when we when we talk about this with our our fellow uh player development managers in other countries it's the same issue that that they see and that is how do you deliver skating with a read a decision with conflict and what i call purpose skating because when i see coaches do russian circles and edgework for 20 minutes at the beginning of pride i mean imagine the mentality of selling a kid on a sport and then the first 20 minutes is gonna be stuff that's monotonous boring no game-like situation not fun no decisions not challenging we're just gonna get this working and then we'll get to the fun stuff and if you think about how songs are written movies are made um the marketing piece of our sport how do we get kids excited about coming to practice how do we make it entertaining and fun so how can we deliver a really important part of our game skating technique in a fun productive um entertaining manner and there's a million ways to do it it's just getting people out of their comfort zone and then the second part of it is and it was mentioned by by allen and and also by by barry and that is the play off the puck tonight we know through analytics 98 of the games played without the puck yet we also know that 99 percent of the feedback coaches give players is what they do with it or on it and so if 99 of our feedback is about 2 percent of the game we're not making hockey players and so how do we create those scenarios and those those uh game-like situations where we put kids in situations though they have to our focus is player one on each team what about player two through six what about the reads the goalie has to make what about all the plays off the puck the best goalies i've coached were never the most athletic timmy thomas jan denis they weren't they weren't the best the best players athletically they weren't the fastest post to post didn't have the best glove hand but both of them were unique in that they they weren't a goalie until they were about 12. and everybody thinks that's a really important thing for a goalie because of the physical aspect but what about the ability to read the game what about the ability to understand the patterns to understand what a player might be thinking on a two on one think about where the puck might be coming on the half wall on a power play what angle would be coming to the net so are we putting our players two through six in situations consistently under conflict under duress that forces them to make reads and it forces them to earn the puck because in our sport unlike any other for the most part once you score you still got to earn the puck back you know it's not your turn so can we create that environment in our practices where my decisions my effort and my execution is rewarded with offensive opportunities and to me that's that's what we're trying to get our coaches to grasp is creating that culture and environment that's game-like that forces our players to be really hard working work early like so many players work late because they don't read the game well so there are steps they're a step behind so how do i work early to get myself the great players all work early that's why they're in the right spot that's why they have the puck more that's why they score goals right we call it anticipation but to me anticipation is working early off of a read right and so we can we can call it anticipation but how do we deliver that to our athletes what is that is that an actual deliverable concept or do we get them to work early because they make a good read and can we create that culture every day in our practices and that's where bill beanie was way ahead of the curve on everybody else in the world way way way ahead of the curve um and and when he was explaining it to coaches you know back in the late 70s early 80s 90s 2000s and even today for some of them it's like talking you know a foreign language they just can't they can't grasp it um but to get them to to embrace some of it as al said earlier even if it's just a couple pieces of it the impact is profound so everything you guys are saying is exactly what we're trying to deliver um and it's a it's a it's a full-time job and there's a lot of pushback there's a lot of naysayers but those that buy in and are really committed um because the early stages are going to be difficult as al mentioned people will leave people will not believe and even when al is going to learn this quickly even with the success that he's going to have with developing players people are still going to leave because they think the grass is always in fact you're probably going to be a product of your own success your better players are going to you're going to develop really good players they're going to go somewhere else um but you just got to stay committed to it because you got it you got to you got to do what's right for the kids and at the end of the day that's that's what we're in the business for