RESPECTING Young Hockey Players

Although this post SEEMS like it’s entirely geared toward very young skaters, I’d like those who deal with older guys and gals to please drink-in the gist of it.  I’ll have a further comment for you at the very end.

– Dennis Chighisola

Okay, I’m not going to go and get toooooo scientific on you.  At the same time I do want to first make you aware of a study just released in this Tuesday’s (7/14/09′s) issue of the journal Child Development.

The reason I cite this is because I did quite some time ago make reference to certain beliefs in my earliest posts that dealt with “Critical Periods in Motor Learning”.  (The two entries should have frightened those dealing with very young athletes into appreciating the fact that certain windows of opportunity arise during a human’s earliest years, and that once those periods pass, learning given skills can be very difficult, if not impossible.)

Anyway, researchers in the Netherlands now say they’ve found evidence that fetuses have short-term memory of sounds by about the 30th week of pregnancy, and that they develop a long-term memory of sound after that.

Again, I’m not going to get overly scientific here (you can Google this and related studies if you have further interest).  And I’m not going to suggest to you that we should all start preparing prenatals for careers in hockey (or any other sport).

What I do want members to appreciate is that learning begins very early in a human’s life, and that some learning even begins prior to birth.

Then, beyond all I’ve said in my earlier two entries (and several others), there’s yet another thing on my mind this morning…

You see, while I think all very young kids are adorable, I’m sometimes turned-off by coaches of very young ones who overdo it in reference to their kids’ “cuteness” (or whatever).

What really troubles me about this?  It’s that such coaches can oftentimes use that cuteness as a reason — or an excuse — not to teach the kids in their charge.  And, in my mind, they fail to R-E-S-P-E-C-T their young players’ abilities — and maybe their wants — to truly learn more.  Yes, I believe little ones WANT to learn.

Now, I hate to bash other coaches, and that’s not really my intent here.  What I feel the need to do, however, is to ask them not to accept that cuteness as a reason not to have a plan.  Yes, we coaches — and parents — want to see our players gradually move from Point A to Point B over a given span, and there’s nothing to say that we shouldn’t be aiming for Points C and D.  That, to me, is respecting our players, or respecting their abilities to learn.

All that said, let me suggest that both parents and coaches combine the best of both worlds…  If you get the chance to watch my video on “Must-do Skating Drills for Beginners”, you might notice that I keep that cuteness-thing very much in mind.  I mean, I do my fun-loving Mr Rogers routine, and I keep my kids laughing throughout a clinic.  What the kids don’t realize — and there’s no need for them to really know it — is that I have a very serious, scientifically-based lesson plan in place.  Actually, I’m betting my kids sense that I respect them (as I take them closer to Points E and F?).  Yet, I pull it off without any pressures whatsoever.

Finally, the rest of this site is aimed at helping anyone — in this case, parents and coaches — design a training routine based on the very latest in science and the art of teaching.  All that information is worthless, though, unless we first have a certain kind of respect for our youngsters’ abilities to learn.

PS:  Although this entry appears aimed at very young players, I’d like coaches of older guys and gals to think seriously about that respect-issue.  Yes, most older players also have a burning desire to learn more.