My First Experience Coaching Hockey

This year I coached my son's Midget A2 hockey team and it was my first experience as a hockey coach. I played a lot of hockey over the years, but most of it was unorganized. Most of my experience with organized hockey came as a referee. I refereed minor hockey for about 8 years up until 2006 when my hips became so bad that I was beginning to have difficulty skating. When I gave up skating it meant giving up the recreational hockey that I played and also refereeing. Between these two activities I was probably on the ice about 10 hours a week, so it was a big part of my life.

At the time that I retired from hockey neither of my two sons played at all. I had taken them to the rink and to skating lessons when they were younger but they just weren't interested in playing. Then, suddenly, about three years ago, Steven, who is my younger son, became interested in playing at the age of 14 and then one year later, at 15, he was playing midget hockey. Not playing all that well, but playing. So I became a hockey Dad during the period when I was hobbled by my hips and during the time I was having the surgery to replace them. Needless to say I did not see myself getting involved too much with the teams, although I did help out a bit now and then by time keeping.

Last fall Steven transferred to a new team and I volunteered to help out as a Manager or whatever, but it turned out that the team needed a Coach. Although I hadn't coached hockey, what I had done was taken some hockey coaching courses way back in the early nineties. I took them because I had thought that I would be able to coach my kids when they were older, but, of course, they never played. So I thought that I would be able to do the basics. I had coached soccer for one year and also instructed Karate-do at my own club for 5 years, so I wasn't exactly new to coaching in general. It turned out that the courses that I had taken were no longer valid so I had to spend a weekend taking a new program that forms the basic requirements for coaching hockey in Canada. Of course, I had a lot of background in minor hockey from refereeing as well. Still it was a challenge because I could not get on the ice with the players during practice because I was still recovering from my surgeries. I didn't know, and still don't know, whether I can skate. I'm planning on trying again this fall.

Anyhow, I felt that this limitation would be mitigated by the fact that the players were older and did not need that type of one-to-one instruction so much. Also there were two other Dads who could help with practices but could not commit to full-time coaching. Essentially I would plan out the practices and then go over it with the other Coaches and then let them run the practice on-ice while I would supply the outlines of the drills with "chalk-talks" from the bench. It wasn't the best arrangement, but it worked. One or both of them also helped on the bench during the games.

One of the problems that we had was that we got off to a slow start with only one practice before the season started. This was due to the fact that I didn't find out that the team needed a coach until about a week and a half prior to the season starting. During that time I had to go to a coaches meeting, go to an ice draft for practice times and attend the weekend coaching clinic. We lost our first game, although it was close, but that set us up for a poor start and we had a loosing record for most of the season. In the meantime I had also arranged to have name tags for the sweaters, which was an additional few hours of running around.

Once the season started we fell into a routine of about 1.5 games to each practice. Attendance is difficult for the players at this age because they have jobs and girlfriends and hockey is simply not as high a priority for them. None of the players at this level would be moving on to any elite level of hockey, so they were basically in it for fun. Given that, I thought that overall our players did attend fairly well but it was erratic enough that we couldn't build much momentum. After each game I would try and analyze an area for us to work on and then research some coaching manuals and the internet for drills that I thought would be interesting and help the players develop individually and as a team. This is where I felt that not being on the ice was a limitation for me. I also didn't feel as though I could generate the enthusiasm which I could have if I was going out to practice with them. For some poorly attended practices the players decided on their own to simply scrimmage for fun.

The games were generally pretty good, we would usually have about 11 or 12 players out. Our goalies attended well and played quite well. Overall I would say that conditioning was a problem for these guys, they could have been in better shape and I think we lost a few games because they ran out of gas. We didn't really have practices to do extra conditioning and I don't think they would have tolerated it that well anyway. I tried to adopt the philosophy of keeping players together as much as possible and we used a rotational basis for the lines, which is fair for all. We did have a couple of players who took a lot of penalties and that cost us, but that is hockey I suppose.

By the end of the season we were playing better and , although we finished in last place, we had won a few games and were improving. We lost one game by default because I allowed one of the goalies to play out because he wanted to try it. I didn't see any problem with it, but apparently that is against the rules so we had to forfeit a game that we won on the ice. The players also forfeited a game after that because not enough of them showed up. That was a low point, but the team rallied into the play-offs by playing their best hockey of the season. We won a couple of games and could have done better except for a few bad bounces.

I kept statistics and summarized the games for the players on Facebook, the page is "Tuxedo Lightning Midget A2". Overall, I think it was successful, there are things I would do differently of course. I think that the kids were great, they were a lot of fun. Most of all I suppose that I am grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in the game this way. I would do it again, but there certainly would be changes.