Our Kids Play Hockey: An Interview With Roger Grillo

[Music] hello hockey friends and families around the world welcome to another edition of our kids play hockey i'm lee elias as always joined by christy casciano burns and mike benelli we have a very special guest today we're joined by roger grillo the new england regional manager for the usa development model roger is a long time hockey player and coach and he fell into his current role in 2009 right before things really got kicked off with the adm in america went public at that point and we're gonna talk to roger today about a bunch of stuff but mainly as we spoke about before it is that time of year where tryouts and evaluations go on and we really want to talk about the culture of hockey around this time surrounding coaches parents and players because like most times during the year this is a time you can really learn a lot about yourself you can learn a lot about who you're going to be about your team what kind of parent you're going to be what kind of coach you're going to be it's very unveiling so roger i want to dive right into it uh you know our our co-host here christy interviewed here earlier the week she gave me some notes and one of the things that really stuck out to me it's the first question is and i love that you said this you said create a culture that embraces failure this is one of the hardest concepts for people to jump into it's also one of those concepts people go you know i get that i get that but but you know my kid this my kid that um but it is a tagline for anyone anyone that has been successful both in this country and abroad so why don't you just dive into what that means for our audience first off and we'll get the conversation going yeah i think it's probably as apparent and certainly um uh through you sports it's not easy to see your child struggle it's not easy at all to see your child uh upset or or hurt um and so our natural reaction is to protect that and and and you know cocoon them um and and in the end of the day i think if you really sat down and and talked to anybody that's been successful in pretty much any walk of life there was a lot of bumps in the road there was a lot of failure through their journey and it was how it was dealt with not only by themselves but by the people around them that really kind of maybe dictated where they ended up and i think in you sports and particularly in our sport of ice hockey it's a game of mistakes and it's managing the mistakes and you know you talk to talk to players that played at a high level they would always say to you that after a game they probably think back and say geez i wish i had those five or six shifts over again right um and so the best players in the world fail consistently um and and so for us as the the the keepers of the game the adults the coaches the administrators to really kind of embrace that culture not only embrace it but almost encourage failure um in a safe positive productive manner is in our minds a big part of player development a hundred percent and like you just said it you know embracing it people always get quizzical when we use that word right embrace it but the truth is it's it's it's as old as the adage of the hot oven right the hot stove if you put your hand on a hot stove and you burn yourself you're not gonna do it again right and let's just say there's a lot of hot stoves out there you know where people can learn uh you know one of the other quotes i have from from christie's research that i loved i loved and kristy you can comment on this too uh was that parents are racing to the wrong finish line and it's not about about being the best player but being about the best six-year-old 12 year old 18 year old yeah you know i love that quote where did you come up with that well we we've said it and i think one of the the the my co-workers i think came up with it at one point and um uh you know we see it all the time and again it's it's very normal for a parent and a lot of our coaches are parent coaches um for the adults to want to have their kid be the best there and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that the challenge there is that there's no shortcut to long-term player development and and i'll never forget mike boyle uh one of one of the top strength and conditioning people and certainly in our sport and in all the united states long time trainer with uh boston university worked with our women's olympic team the boston red sox zone and so on um he came up with the the the phrase you can't speed farm development and and um i've used it all the time i think it's a great great saying and and and part of it is that people are you know you want your kid to be on that top team you want your kid to be one of the top players you want your kid to have success but sometimes by by by really forcing that at a young age the back side of that or the other side of the coin of that is burnout and i try to get parents and coaches to always understand that at some stage and it's usually like around that 13 14 year old range we have to pass responsibility for development to the athlete because now how you eat how how you train what you do away from the rink you know your your strength training your your your workout regimen that's really going to be the the deciding factor on where you go next right but that takes a ton of passion so if we're pushing those buttons down at five six seven eight nine ten is the athlete gonna have the passion to work at it when it becomes most important and i would say a lot of our kids don't because we're trying to win that race to the wrong finish line we're trying to develop the best 10 year old the best 12 year old and if you talk to players in any sport who play at the highest level and you ask them what their record was back when they were 10 11 12 i guarantee you they probably can't tell you um they can tell you some of the the lumps some of the positives some of the fun their buddies their friends but they don't know if they won or lost they just enjoyed the sport and passion is priority number one in any sport right and also roger what you mentioned is you of course you want your kids to be on the best team but you also want them to have the best experience and as you pointed out if your kid's not in the top half of a team and on the bottom half you got to step back and look are they really going to have the best experience being on the bottom half of this team that's something you really need to seriously consider too as your kids start to move up absolutely and i think another really big pothole a lot of parents step into is that they think that competition drives development at a young age that i have to have my kid playing against and with the best players in order for them to develop and i always try to explain to them that there's there's a reason why there's no honors classes in elementary schools and that's because all we're trying to do at the young age is build the base we're just trying to give them the foundation of athleticism of fun of passion building of the experience of being with their friends um and and failure as we talked about before is a big part of that but if i'm constantly chasing and i'm not touching the puck or or scoring goals or feeling good about myself my player development really gets plateaued it really stagnates and that's a huge mistake there comes a point in player development where competition is important but in our minds that's up in the the the mid-teens and and later on um where that that other driving factor of playing with and against better players is a big part but not when they're 10. um it's a huge mistake and if i'm a player you think about you think about that goaltender who's on a team that's so strong that they might get five shots a game and they're standing in the net the whole time like are they really part of the game are they really experiencing the the the ability to overcome i gave up a bad goal and my team lost that's all part of player development and and sometimes we we do such a poor job of allowing that to happen naturally that our kids struggle then when reality sets in when they get older you know it's a great point that you're bringing up and you know we love telling stories on this on this show um and one of the ones that i've been telling a lot this year is that i am i i have always coached at an extremely high level and this is the first year i'm ever doing adams because my son's an adam which is a it's a completely different world at that level and uh and i acknowledged that the first day i was like look if you want to know how to do like a 1-3-1 neutral zone trap i'm your guy but i'm not an adams coach so i really rely on the coach of the team and you know one of the things he told me early on that really was profound was he goes like there's really only one skill we need to teach at this level in skating he goes and we need to make that as fun as humanly possible for these kids so that it's not a bag skate every practice and he has really taught me and the other coaches too the other dads all these fundamental skating drills that i i did not benefit from because when i was growing up the adm current adm wasn't in place yet it was bag skate so um i love that and you know one of the things i tell my kids now is especially early on and i did this early on with whenever i've been doing learn to skate in the past or with this team the first thing i say to the kids is what is the first rule of skating or what's the first rule of hockey and i say it's the first rule is that it's okay to fall down so echoing you the first thing i tell these kids is it's okay to fail it's completely normal that's the first rule i don't want you to be afraid to fall down it's something i learned from watching the adm it's something i've learned from other coaches but you know we start that early right you want to start that process really early mike you can comment on this too mike mike obviously is is heavily involved in this but you know we we talked about that or or i remember when i was an older player doing drills to failure right you do the drill until you fail right so that that's the outcome is to fail the goal is to fail right those were usually the most beneficial drills to me because not only did i learn my limit but i learned how to push myself i learned that i had to reach that point it was forced failure right so just continuing along that line of thought i think that especially like you said under 12. which we're going to talk about 12 and up in a minute just have fun just enjoy the game like you said you don't want the passion to to burn away i've seen that so often man where uh an 18 year old who really has talent potentially to go farther just stops just because he's not enjoying it value system is on winning and not on love right the parents that you love them uh let's just keep going on that train of thought i'm rambling now but i thought that was fascinating when i learned to transition yeah i think we could do an entire podcast on how to deliver skating for our are you i think i think what's happened you know in my generation um it was power skating like you know we're gonna do we're gonna do our 20 to 30 minutes of power we're going to do the non-fun stuff at the start of practice so that you can do the fun stuff at the end of practice i mean think about that mentality think about as a salesperson or as a teacher to motivate young kids you're going to tell them we're going to do non-fun stuff for 20 to 30 minutes so that we can get to the fun stuff so they completely disengage they completely emotionally mentally shut down and player development completely stops and yet we think we're delivering this high-end you know great development model and and i just always use the the the phrase flintstone vitamins i mean there's a reason why twin stone vitamins is still in business they figured out how to deliver something really good for kids that doesn't taste like you know something that's healthy right it tastes like and so can we not deliver which is something really important skating can we not deliver that in a fun entertaining productive manner and i would say absolutely yes and absolutely we have to if we don't we're really not developing hockey players we're just developing robots and that's that's a huge huge mistake that i think a lot of people are making with our young athletes and i would tell you also having coached college hockey for a long time you got to make it fun for those guys too and then i'll tell you what the pro coaches today you've got to find a way to entertain those guys to get them to to kind of really buy in and take that next level of engagement and intensity and focus you got you got to almost trick them into it yeah it's about attacking it on a human level and like you said not a robotic level not not to get a deep cut here and mike i am gonna transition but mike's been very patient today on this episode not speaking yet but you know um it's funny when you look at like the soviet union right and the way they trained basically robots i mean there's nothing wrong with saying that uh you know the joke is they never smiled right but when they had anatoly tarasov as their coach he had an understanding of this on making it fun and it was funny because that ended up almost undoing him in a lot of ways within his own country for those who follow kind of you know old school global hockey um anatoly tarasov not only did he you know really become the godfather of office training and development but he really loved his players and when he they moved him out of that system in the soviet union in the early 80s the program started to suffer right not just because of the downfall of the soviet union i mean they did create great hockey players but if you watch any documentary about the red army or those teams you're hard-pressed to find someone that they're all very patriotic but you're hard-pressed to find someone who goes i really loved going to practice with my teammates i mean the stories are i miss my father's death because i had to be at practice right so we don't want to emulate that here right i mean you take what you can learn from those development models but uh i agree with you 100 now mike i got to turn to you i got to give you a chance to talk i feel bad that i haven't done that yet but mike you're also heavily involved in this world right i'm sure you have like six comments already piled up that you want to say so i'm not gonna even ask a question mike i'm just gonna let you talk yeah i know well listen i'm i'm i'm on the disciple of roger gorilla tree i mean i think i think what roger's done with usa hockey in the past you know let's just say 10 years just for a time frame about where we were and the way we talk right i mean everything that i i try to do is just continually educating myself as a coach to listen to the best coaches that have gone out there and and not only done the research but got dirty in this like actually you know so roger i guess my question to you is how can we how can we educate and influence coaches to understand that the the 12 view 10u my hockey rankings world the the lonely d in the cross ice three on three where the d has to be in a triangle formation and that you know what can we do as as parents uh for our kids to educate ourselves about you know other than you know seeing some usa hockey stuff but what can we do as parents to you know help just educate ourselves and feel good about what the rest of the world is doing and how not only is usa hockey leading that but usa hockey has done the research and this and and the facts right that give us this uh the story that that's being told through the american development model yeah it's it's uh it's not easy it's constant discussions like this right it's it's constantly getting just stories and and and talking about it and really at the end of the day i think for most people when you do sit down and talk about it it's almost like common sense kind of hits you right in the face right it's just like well that makes sense like i tell coaches all the time like um you know back in my generation we could go in and we could do some team structure and we could do some of that stuff but we had 20 to 30 hours of outdoor ice in our back pocket and that's where we that's where we developed that's where we became players it wasn't the inside stuff that was just that was just the extra where we really developed was on the pond and and you know you mentioned the the the russians if you if you talk to larry onoff and those guys they'll tell you that in between apartment complexes they played a ton of unstructured play and that's where they developed their game and then they they went inside and got a little bit more structure and discipline and all that other stuff but the really at the base of the foundation was just to play and i tell coaches all the time when you go to the outdoor rink and you go to the pond you go to your backyard drink do you go out there without pucks do you go out there and just do edge work for 28 minutes to an hour when it's 20 degrees outside and i i know growing up that if we lost the puck in the snow bank or you know just it disappeared because that's what happens to them for somehow it's almost like socks in a dryer we'd figure out a tape ball we figured out a chunk of ice or we went home we didn't start doing edge work we didn't start on our stride right because that's not fun it's important we were getting that work through the game we were getting our repetitions through the competition through the fun but can can we not look at how what really allowed my generation generations before to really truly develop can we not take those those uh components and then put them into the modern world today there's some things that happened back then that we would never want to add to now i tell the coach all time when you i'm not going to a dentist that uses 30 year old techniques he's not going to do it so why am i gonna go to a coach that uses 30 year old techniques and tools i'm not going to do it it's just not common sense right we got to modernize things but we can't lose sight of what the most important aspect of it and that is having fun and and developing players right i think this year especially in this in this the real hockey pause right that you got to see all the outdoor rinks and the and the pop-up brinks in the backyards and and i joke all the time like i've never seen a group of kids go to a pond and this year was the best i mean it was one of the best years ever you know for for free play and just exploring the game right and i have yet to see you know three four kids go out in a pond and shovel off an nhl sized ice rink right they just shovel up just enough so they can play and they can have that and touch the puck and then and then we get on the ice and we throw these kids on this 17 000 square feet of ice and we think we have to use it all or or we're losing development and it's it is it is a like a light bulb moment that when you watch children play um and we talk about this a lot on this podcast about the the need for you know we it's so crazy that we have to actually structure free time for kids because we've taken it all away from them and i think you know i think certainly the american development model has done has given the blueprint to that but i think we're still a long way away from uh really implementing it and seeing where parents aren't getting uh you know we had a skate last night we had 15 kids showed up and i just threw a couple pucks out and said you guys figure your team out and then have you know have have at it like well aren't we gonna like do you want us to do some warm-up drills or do you wanna i go no just just go lie don't worry about it you know and looking up at mom and dad like i don't know if you know is this worth me being here and it's such an odd it's just an odd occurrence that this has happened where you know the kids don't know how to have free play yeah we've kind of taken that away from them and they can learn some great lessons by just having fun without even realizing that they're like i'll go back i'm going back to when my kids were really little and the first time they were out on the ice the way i taught him how to skate i got mr bubble out and i would blow bubbles on the ice and tell him okay go pop the bubbles now that was fun for them did i say now make sure you're aiming your edges this way and do your crossover they just went out and had fun popping bubbles and by the end of the day they were skating you know when you make it fun for them they're learning all the skills without making it feel like it's so instructional and boring so you know there's a lot of ways you can weave fun into lessons but you know what i wanted to talk about to you guys is when we're getting back to cuts and how to handle it it's really tough on you as a parent as well as well as your kid so i want to talk a little bit about how to handle it as a parent and one of the things roger pointed out which fortunately we're on the same page here is you don't want to get emotional uh after when you you find out your kid just got cut try not to show that i when my daughter got cut from a aaa team first time she had oh my gosh the tears flowed and i wanted to cry but i didn't let her show how much i it hurt me too that she didn't make it because i watched her work so hard and i thought she was ready she didn't make it i was crying on the inside but not on the outside just stay calm and tell them it's going to be okay take a step back sophia what do we need to work on do you want to continue this if you do we'll look for a team that's more suitable for where you're at now and work hard and she had the passion and wanted to do that and was willing to work hard then we'd go for it but uh roger as you pointed out be more even keeled as a sport parent is really important yeah it's hard it's really hard i hired my son played college baseball and he was a relief pitcher so there's only two things that can happen it's either going to be good or it's going to be bad there's no there's no you did okay today because it's you either got the outs or you didn't get the outs and it's really cut and dry it's almost like a being a goaltender's parent in a shootout right it's either going in or they can go in it's there's only two outcomes and so to getting those high moments and those low moments as you're watching or being involved in your child's journey it's really can be difficult but if if you don't manage it well it just adds another layer of stress on top of the the athlete and you know being around some some great hockey or sports parents in my tenure guys that i coached they never got too high and they never got to on the inside you know they were hurt you know but there was always a smile it was always it's okay and i'm gonna be there for you to support you you know it has nothing to do with what i think of you um and you're gonna be okay it's not the end of the world and and and i think one of the mistakes that's made is i think people think like the american development model is anti-competition anti-winning we would say no every time you step on the ice you're trying to win just don't look for the shortcuts to get there right because the shortcuts are what become the negative right and and then same thing with with mom's dad it's okay to want your kid to be good it's okay to to want your kid to win and win championships that's perfectly normal but how we handle it when it doesn't happen is really important and mike have you seen kids real our parents really lose it when their kids get cut from a teen it gets so emotional i mean and in today's sport you know if you got cut from your the the the yellow bruin team you know when you were eight in house league it didn't seem like it was the end of the world right i mean that's and that's like the world i grew up in where you had a lot of chances to get cut or moved or didn't make a particular group but now it's it's you know to rogers analogy you know it's either you're on or you're off like there's there's not a lot of options for for for parents and then it becomes okay i'm so mad that my kids should have made this team i'm now gonna leave and go to another organization that has the same amount of letters but they have a space for me and i think it just it certainly it's it's diminishes it for the kid but i think it diminishes it for all of us for for hockey right because it's just diluting what we feel is an accomplishment and i think you know and i think but we we as organizations right as hockey people we just have to find better ways to have uh more levels of good experiences so that when there is a kid cut that there's a reason for it there's a solution and then there's a goal to get them right back to a place where maybe they could play at that higher level you know i want to jump in here because one of the things i love to do on our show is to provide solutions or gateways for parents coaches and players to start to go down this path you know one of the quotes that's been getting a lot of a lot of runs lately but in a different way was we all know michael jordan didn't make his high school basketball team and what i've noticed is you know when i was younger he didn't make it he tried hard and he made it right and now that quote is turning a bit to it he didn't make it his mother then and this is the important part his mother said well that's too bad work harder basically maybe not that harsh and then he started working hard to make it his mother had that impact and i'm sure his father too right so that quotes kind of turned to not just oh michael jordan overcame the odds the quote is like he had good parents that didn't just let him cry about it they told him to get up now we're talking about be even killed we're talking about you know mentality and this is what i want to bring up because there is there is things you can do right and when i work with teams especially in the group setting we talk about being even killed and the question is how do i do that well to rogers point to christie's point and mike to your point those moments of devastation or even elation goes both ways you can work on right then you shouldn't be focused on the i didn't make the team you should actually be focused on the emotion the devastation acknowledge that emotion right because this is how you learn to get even keeled a lot of people don't acknowledge their emotions you get the hockey fan that throws something at his tv when his team loses what do we teach in our kids you have no control over that game right so my philosophies with this or i try to keep it really simple is one is only focus on the things that you control number one number two is live in the present moment as much as you possibly can right now let's just take getting cut from a team mike that your example i wanted to play on this team i didn't get on the team christy you said this as a parent you will be devastated for your kid if they hurt you hurt that's the first thing you got to acknowledge right the second thing you have to acknowledge and maybe talk to your kid about this is what are you feeling right now when they're ready to talk obviously right after the moment is probably not the best time to do this but what are you feeling i'm feeling devastated i'm feeling like they kicked me off the team i'm feeling this okay let's explore those emotions for a moment right a lot of times we get parents like no be hard be hard well if we don't teach them how to deal with that if they don't know what that emotion is how can we expect them to be hard you're telling them to bury it what happens when you bury things they explode burnout massive massive problems right so it's all about acknowledging the emotion and learning how to deal with that emotion same thing when you win right it's a good feeling but if you stay up there too long you're gonna eventually come down right so roger i didn't know if you wanted to comment on that uh but it's just a lot of that emotional stuff that people didn't want to talk about is very important to helping teach someone to be even keeled yeah and it's it's it's not easy i mean it's it's it's it's great uh in theory and stuff and but when you're living through the moment and and it's just human nature to protect your child i mean it's right you know when you stick your stick your hand in the bears then you're probably going to get bit and we're attacked so you know i i i i think i think i think you know being a parent brings along some some just natural reactions and um i think when it when it comes to i think i think handling youth sports and and failure in youth sport is is a really important thing because there's going to be bigger fish to fry right in child's life than not making a team uh there's gonna be bigger moments that that are gonna be way more important than that um and so you know i think um i i always feel for the for the coaches that coach their own kids for a long period of time because i always try to explain to them like there's gonna come a moment where you're gonna need to be dad or mom and it's not about the forecheck it's not about a penalty you took it's about some really tough stuff right and you want them to to really dial in on you and not think oh it's coach talking again um and so to to step back sometimes um and and uh not be as involved as we all want to be uh is probably a pretty healthy move uh at some point you know it brings me actually into the next question um we talked about the trade-off at 12 13 14 from kind of parenting to letting the kid find their own way i'd be remiss um if i didn't ask you this you know so here's the thing a lot of parents feel or some parents feel like hey my kid's gonna make it or my kid's going all the way and i look i don't want to be ever the bad guy that's like like nobody makes i hate when people say that the truth is you can't very well go all the way we don't know right but at that trade-off point what are some of the the tricks or what are some of the tips you can give parents whether the kids going all the way or not like i'm not negating either side of that to assist the parent in that handoff right because it it's really hard it's really hard for a parent to just kind of i don't say fully let go but stand back right and say hey if you want to do it you'll do it i've told the story on this podcast many times how when i was that age my father said to me if you want to make it you'll go out there and practice on your own and that was the click for me he said it right to my face and i never had to ask him again to help me practice i just did it so what are the the tips that you have for parents today recognize that maybe they're not letting go and then how to let go from that point well i think if if if mom or dad are the the reason why the kid's working then it's not it's it's a false it's a false foundation and it's going to crumble right um i think for parents once they get to that certain age you're really there just as a support you're there to drive them you're there to you know maybe help financially to pay for some things you know you're there to watch and and cheer um but really the the work and the desire to work and the the the drive has to purely come from the the athlete and the athlete needs to want it a lot more than mom or dad wanted um and that's sometimes you just don't see that with the older athletes because a lot of cases it was it was it was a false foundation to begin with early on and and i i get parents of young players all the time ask me listen my my kid doesn't want to go with the rink and i said well don't go to the rink like it's pretty simple why spend a lot of money on this it's pretty simple but but i paid all this money i go yeah but like it's it's a sport it's not school you know it's a mandatory it's not something that's that's that's you know uh that really at the end of the day that important um and and find something they do want to do um that they are excited about i always tell the story there's something you brought up lee that i would i'd like to comment on too that is that i it drives me nuts when people throw out the stats of your kid only has one percent chance of going to play college yeah yeah i hate that because because that's the child's dream and i would never ever ever say to a kid you can't become a great musician you can't become a great doctor you can't become the smartest person you can go do whatever you want to do what's your drive what's your passion and sometimes we suck the life out of them by telling them they can't do it yeah i hate that i don't understand i mean i mean imagine going to class and the teacher is like listen you'll never you'll never be an engineer it's impossible for you right and i'm like well why why i'm eight and i love legos and i like to you know i like to do these things but i think it's it's so crazy hey raj i had a question so the parents side i get it right that that you know we have to do a better job of preparing our kids what can we do as coaches and i'm a parent coach and i always try to preface this i always get calls from you know especially this time of year tryouts oh i'm looking to leave my organization mike and we'd like to come over and try out for your team and i go what's the problem with the team it goes oh it's parent coaching well just to let you know we have four parent coaches i said but it's all i think it's all how you use that parent coaching moniker right but what can we do as organizations and coaches and people that are making these cuts like what can we do to make that experience a better experience for the family and the kids yeah i think i think it's it's i think the reality of it is you're going to have parent coaches i think and that's perfectly okay i think it's absolutely normal and perfect okay and there's some that handle that very well and there's some that that i mean i remember when i did finally get to coach my own son my wife was like how come dominic never gets to start i was i was trying to prove i wasn't going to be that bad hockey pant right so my own kid almost got the shorter end of the stick and i have friends that are like that too and we talk about it all the time we try to go the other way so there's a there's a other side of that story that's just as you know detrimental as taking too much care of your own kid right i got i got home the other day and my wife had to watch the game on live bar and she can and she goes well how can michaels get as much ice time as the other defenseman i'm like wait whoa we got a 24 hour rule here i said you got to wait on this just watching you're just watching your own kid i think so i think at some point it's really important that they hear another voice so whether it's one of the other coaches um if you're trying to be you know constructively criticize or coach him up or whatever you know tell him some things um it's not it's never a bad thing to to uh have somebody another voice because i think at some point you're gonna have discussions with your child about you know their health their their schooling their behavior you know their social interaction i mean how they use their cell phone today i mean there's so many other discussions that are going to be so much more important than you know what they did on the on the penalty kill um so i think it's important that that that that you don't you don't treat them unfairly either way right too positive too negative but that once in a while you have somebody else talk to them about the hockey stuff um so that you can just be dad or mom um and and really hard thing is in the car ride home is go right to something besides what just happened even if it was a positive just move on to something else because the kids do the kids want stuff way quicker than we do and it's hard like i i i look back at myself and i made some mistakes for sure it's really hard because you you you know what your child wants you know how how passionate they are about it and you want to fix it for them and we can't we can guide them but we can't fix it it's that's that's their responsibility especially as they get older it goes back to what you said too like you know i i had this great coach tell me as a coach this advice because coaches are always tough about following their own advice and the thing is as coaches we fail too and get we have to embrace the failure as well to learn but you know it's funny we give out a lot of advice sometimes we don't follow them advice you know another point roger i want to bring up too sometimes adults forget how to be kids or forget what it was like to be a kid you know we talked about free play and it's i still play quite a bit and don't even know i love the competition aspect of playing in an adult league i really do but i still love to play open hockey and why because the same reasons the kids do there's no refs there's no score being kept i can just go out there and have fun it doesn't matter if i get scored on you know so that that kid still really does live in us as adults we just kind of forget or it transitions into something else or becomes like a locker room talk type mentality but the truth is is that it never really goes away we just kind of forget so kids are also a gateway for us to learn about ourselves a little bit too um and then another thing you both brought up that's funny i remember um i was watching my own my kid's only seven and and i'll say this this is gonna sound kind of funny but he's pretty good at cutting down angles for some reason i don't go into it any farther than that i just noticed that and i was talking to the head coach of my team again coaching moment for me i said yeah he's really good at that like maybe he's going to be a defenseman and he says to me yeah he's a defense minister he's an offenseman last year next year you know is this he's just like he's seven and i was like yeah that's a good point i'm not gonna bring up him cutting off the angles let's just he'll just do what he does but uh yeah i know i'm always amazed by these conversations because you know and and again what you said i've said this quote many times on the show about you know coaches who say things like you'll never make it what's the point or we know you know i was told this it's that as an adult you don't have to support the dream that someone has but you need to support their right to have a dream right so if your kid wants to be an nhl superstar you might know in your head that might not happen but you need to support their right to have that dream because be from that dream it's like a flower will bloom other things the possibility of becoming whatever they want to be when they grow up or the possibility of knowing hey maybe i can try this entrepreneurship i mean there's so many roads that this could leave to lead to excuse me you know sports hockey in our case it's a vehicle for growth as a human being more than just being for growth as a hockey player you know and you know you said earlier i want to transition this a little bit you said earlier that there are people that say that well the the u.s development model doesn't breed competition well the statistics do not show that whatsoever we've had more world junior wins since this was introduced we've had more players make the nhl since this was introduced we've had more high level hockey since this was introduced there's nothing to actually prove the opposite that it's actually done anything bad it's done nothing but good for usa hockey and you've been in that development model really since it launched about 20 years ago 20 plus years ago um so and it's changed the experience for everybody from atom up that's the other thing we talked about that earlier in the show or even from the atom level it's all about having fun right so what has that experience been like watching this develop it's still developing all the time which is the genius of it and what can we expect moving forward with the adm yeah i think it's um uh it's been an interesting journey it's um you know i think at first it was all about selling you know trying to get people just to buy in like right this works and and and now i think we're at the phase where we still have to sell new parents certainly there's always new people coming into the sport and we always got to keep our eye on the ball with that but now it's it's we've seen some huge it seems like it's taken forever it seems like there hasn't been a lot of big change but if you really really dig deep it's been change in anything is not easy and when you're talking about dramatic change you know going from full ice to to cross ice or half is taking checking full body checking out of 12 and under um and moving it up a a group um i mean we've done some things that that you know taking icing out of out of pelican for youth hockey i mean think about that think about some of the stuff that we allowed to happen that's just so anti-player development um and uh you know so it it's it it's it's been it's been a blast and the beauty of it is as you mentioned it works like it's not it's not just theory and philosophy this stuff really really works it's way more enjoyable once you do embrace it for the coaches the parents and the athletes um and the impact is dramatic and i think where we're going to be moving next is just helping people implement it cleaner you know i i always use the analogy spinal tap like i'm going to come watch your practice and your amp might go to eight it's a pretty good practice but how are we gonna get your amp to go to 11 right because if we can really maximize player development opportunities for our kids in our training because of the lack of unstructured play then that's the game changer if we can get people to embrace the training model right and kind of tamper down the competition model we're going to develop a lot more well-balanced athletes because right now the competition the biggest disappointment for me during kovid was i thought because kids couldn't travel around and play all these games that people would embrace practice more and it happened a little bit and mike made a great point about the backyard rink and more outdoor unstructured that was a huge plus but what i really noticed was there was so much angst because they couldn't play their games and they could go play against this team and they couldn't travel up to boston and they couldn't you do this and that and it it was a little disheartening but it it opened our eyes to something that we already knew and that is that competition is king and we have to we have to understand that but we have to make sure that practice and training is the priority that that that for the adults for the adults that how we attack the training and embrace the training as parents and coaches and administrators is going to be the deciding factor on how well our athletes do as they move forward right and parents should not get swept into as we said at the top of the show your kid has to play at the highest level be with the best to be the best every kid develops at a different pace and we saw that with our own daughter you know i mentioned earlier she got cut from that triple a team so she played house for another year a house team actually allowed her to touch the puck a lot more get very creative and build her confidence and she finally as the one coach said unleash the kraken she developed this incredible shot so good so she went made the high school team they won a state championship and early on when she didn't make that triple a team parents were saying oh she's never going to play college hockey that's it if she didn't make the team at this age age 13 forget about your dream of playing college hockey but she never did because she had a love for the game a willingness to figure out how to overcome that adversity and an injury you know she had a meniscus tear and she was on crutches for months but that didn't stop her because she had such a passion and love for the game she's now playing college hockey on age 13 all the naysayers said it would never happen so don't underestimate your kids either support them in their dream be there for them and let them figure it out for themselves yeah we don't we don't we think we know we don't know um i always have a story i tell about you know evaluating somebody's talent at different stages and my father had a pretty famous rock and roll band in 1958 and and he was in a junior in high school and they toured the country they had number one song in the country and they were really they were killing it and their classmate one one year ahead of them wanted to join the band so they had him come over and he wanted to play keyboards and piano and had a little try out in my grandparents basement and they didn't they said no it's you're not good enough or there's no chance you're gonna you're gonna ruin whatever we got going positive you're not you're gonna take us the other way well that young man changed his name from robert zimmerman to bob dylan about three years later went on to to win a nobel peace prize for literature and to um set the world on fire with music so just the word of the wise to all the adults out there that are doing all these evaluating and and deciding who's got talent who doesn't we don't know we don't know what's going on here for that that's a great story i let my dad forget that very often by the way roger i'm not gonna lie i had my life too i had another story lined up but it's not gonna top that so i'm not gonna tell it yeah but i think that's actually a good place to move up and i was gonna say christy or mike do you have any other questions before we close this out because that's a that's a phenomenal story that's the best way to add this block here right right okay a little dylan yeah exactly we'll get the copyright on the way out we'll make sure that no but roger that is a great way to end the episode i wanted to make sure that but we really appreciate you coming on here today we hope to have you back in the future it's invaluable advice and and for those of you listening at home we hope you found it valuable as well but roger again thank you so much for being here my pleasure it was a lot of fun and and all the best to everybody and that brings us to this point if you enjoyed this episode of our kids play hockey we got a lot of them now we're well over 20. check this out on our kidsplayhockey.com for all of them or you can listen to us wherever podcasts are out there or you can watch us on youtube or facebook pretty much just search our kids play hockey and you'll find us so for christina cassiano burns mike benelli and roger grillo i'm leo elias thank you so much for watching this edition of our kids play hockey and we will see you next week have a great day everyone