Let "em Play Let the Game Teach

came about but i know that bill beanie's idea of the thinking happens and all the all direction play and skating and decision making is something that the small area games will accomplish without any coaching now the biggest thing of all here is to me is coaches telling players what to do and you would you would mention that coaches are thinking for the players they're telling them what to do and uh i think in coaching the biggest thing now is knowing what to ask the players and we have somebody on who a little bit reluctant to talk about this but he's coached hockey he teaches two students in a business in law school and he talks about the socrates method of learning being applied in his classes and to me the socrates method of coaching is just as important so dave i'm sorry but i i just think what you have to add would be really valuable to the decision making which will occur without any direction if you let them play dave are you okay are you still on i'm here while you're oh i i for everyone here i told wally you guys are probably bored of me talking about this uh roger actually you and i met years ago brian deroser was i think your assistant coach at brown and i used to coach at st mike's a guy named john direnzo played for me who you recruited i think he was a pretty good player for you guys so yeah all his flaws were my fault no i i coached johnny just his senior year and brian had left to go back to bu before i got to brown all right so but i know i know both of them very well johnny was a great kid i i haven't heard that name in a while so thank you for mentioning it because how old everybody is yeah i all i said to wally is the way we teach at this business school is we don't actually answer questions we ask questions that's a socratic method so whenever my job is not to provide and lecture and provide facts to students my job is to stimulate their thinking so the allegory i would use in hockey is is you know read and react in execution is what we would teach analysis decision making and implementation so you have a bunch of data in front of you which is in hockey is all the information around me we teach them how to assess all that information and make the best decision they can under the circumstances given ambiguity and be confident in those decisions recognizing they won't be right 100 of the time and then stress to them that even knowing what to do is not as important as being able to implement that decision so i think that's where we focus as coaches we teach people how to pass a puck is the last thing they do after they assess where all the checking pressures from determine who's open make the decision to move the puck in that direction and then eventually make the execution of that skill that we've taught them and we spend a lot more time on the front end talking about the decision-making process without telling them what to do yeah and we just train them that way and through repetition and they do three case studies a day you know 150 days a year for two years they get used to kind of going through that process and learning how to figure it out on their own yeah that's great stuff david and and it reminds me of two things um um what we're really focusing now in our coaching education is more on how to coach not so much what to coach yeah um and and and so there's a big big part of that in our the big change over the last year and a half in our coaching education on more on how to coach and then i as a former teacher i i remember going to college and taking all these great courses to become a teacher and then looking back at it realizing that the greatest course i took was student teaching and i can't imagine being a teacher without student teaching right and so if you equate that to to players and how we create practice i mean imagine playing a game without playing the game i mean it's it's so much of it we try to strip down and and put it into a box and break it down into its finest points and it's just not that's not the game and and i always use the analogy of of if i'm driving on the 401 to go recruiting like i used to back in the day um and it's you know well it probably doesn't matter what time of day you're driving out there's going to be traffic but there's no traffic imagine that on the 401 never happens but i can just turn the music on and stare out my front window and just cruise and and drive but now i'm in traffic and i got to know what not only is what's happening in front of me but what's happening on each side of me and what's coming up behind me so i'm constantly scanning the road i'm constantly having to make decisions and and make reads and so we're trying to get our coaches to constantly be in traffic but put put your players in traffic like learn the layers of the game know what's ahead of you know what's on each side of you and know what's coming next is it a teammate is an opponent and that's why breaking down the space and putting them in smaller spaces is so so so critical sweden just did an analytic study over covid and they just implemented it i think this is the first year where their eight and unders will play five on five and the six of the rings that's their game and then their tenant unders will play four on four cross ice their 12 and unders will play four on four half ice and their phantoms they're 14 and unders half their season will be four on four half ice and we struggle to get our 8u players and the reason why they did it was they did a study they did an analytic study on on all the decisions all the reads all the touches all the everything that happens in a game from a development standpoint um and how do we create the most optimal environment for our players to get better not just in practice but during game day and that's what they came up with and they're implementing right now and we're going to be meeting with them here in a week so we're really excited to hear we know what the feedback's going to be um but when you can have science and numbers to back up your your thoughts it's that much more impactful i would add a couple things well one i i hope they use odd number situations too so you'll understand how to work three on twos three on ones et cetera et cetera yeah in the game model they'll they'll they'll remove kids because yeah exactly yeah and to kim's point my my greatest development years were as a teenager playing hooky in high school and going to meadowvale four four rings for three bucks playing six hours of shinny and making mistakes having someone score in our net pull it out try again no pressure and learning the creative side of the game through kind of trial and error and experimentation we don't do that enough anymore so i there's nothing more fun than going to the outdoor rinks and then learning all those skills that you can under those you know circumstances well i don't know if you're uh i'll go ahead al i know wally's on mute i have to do that that's sort of my mantra is mutinous i just said a couple of comments um like on the outdoor stuff so we we've been fortunate here this year we've actually had like a rare good year for outdoor rinks and it's been just awesome to see what's been happening with the kids like we might we've got a parent on our on uh our team who has a really nice backyard drink it's about 40 by 60. got lights and all that you know all that kind of stuff so we've had a couple of weekends where we've gone for like five six hours after our games on a saturday afternoon and the parents are you know having their having a couple of drinks in the in the kitchen and looking out the window watching the kids out playing in the backyard and it's amazing to see them play four on four on this 40 by 60 and then see what they're doing there translate into their game the next day like we've been talking to them about communication and you know talking to each other and stuff all season long and they went out and played five hours on an outdoor rank and all you could hear is kids like calling for the you know talking to each other and all this and they get out in their game and they did it and we you know it's again it's been something that we've been working on all season and they just kind of