How To Improve Your Ice Hockey Coaching Skills and Abilities
How To Improve Your Ice Hockey Coaching Skills and Abilities
How to become a better ice hockey coach by improving your coaching skills/abilities
While the Hockey IQ newsletter often discusses “what to coach,” we must remain vigilant to understand just because someone knows a lot about something, does not necessarily mean they are a good coach. Similarly, being talented at doing something does not necessarily indicate you are gifted at coaching. If this were true, Wayne Gretzky would be the best ice hockey coach of all time. Coaching is about the ability to spread belief, guide attention, and help others learn.
So what goes into being a great coach?
Skills of Coaching
(1) Observation
Any coach's eyes are the largest collector of information. They find ways to take in more and better information. This is the “heads-up hockey” for coaches.
A common mistake coaches make is not observing enough. Too often they are stuck running a drill or are unable to find the best vantage points on the ice.
I am a massive fan of “coachless activities” that can run themselves with no or little coach involvement so coaches can focus on… coaching! A good start is having No Whistle, No Whiteboard, No Problem.
Personally, I love to watch practices at least one more time via LiveBarn to pick up more information to better understand the players, habits, teamwork, etc.
(2) Explanation
First, we all know that rink acoustics can be terrible. Simple keys are gaining attention, standing where all can hear you, and keeping your messaging brief!
Simple is effective. Short is memorable.
A common coaching mistake is immediately layering in complexity. Great coaches understand to start simple, and then subsequently add layers to build complexity.
Most importantly… separate explanation from demonstration.
(3) Demonstration
Demonstrate in silence. Again, acoustics at the rink are usually unfavorable.
A high-school coach I know likes to bring in other coaches during the summer to see how they operate. He was recently made aware of this concept demonstrating in silence. One of the guest coaches was explaining and demonstrating together while he was standing with the player taking in the coaching. It was glaringly and painfully obvious to him that demonstrating and explaining together was truly awful.
A great coaching hack is to have the players focus on one key detail within the demonstration. Guiding eyes and minds!
If you struggle to perform the demonstration, it’s a great time to have a player show off their aptitude.
(4) Check for Understanding / Question Asking
This is a rabbit hole you can spend a career on. Let’s just say that you learn more when people pose a question that gets you reflecting and thinking than when someone simply tells you something.
The brain that does the thinking does the learning.
Avoid the two worst questions in hockey: (1) Does that make sense? & (2) Any questions?
A great general way to approach this is to have a curious mindset and try to learn from the players. Here are a few starting questions to kick off your journey:
“I noticed that you did this, what was your thought process?”
What did you see? This helps you understand where a player needs to improve. Is it in gathering information? Analyzing the information? or executing on the information?
If there is pressure here, what would you do differently?
What if you tried ___?
You’ve been successful with that twice in a row, what different options are there?
What are the key things you’re thinking about while doing this?
Being non-judgemental and curious to learn is the best mindset. A teacher who is still learning has sky-high value to their students/players. The coach doesn’t even need to have all the answers, kicking the question back to the players can be extremely powerful… “What do you think?”
(5) Giving Feedback
Be specific in your feedback. “We have to work harder” is counterproductive and often leads to worse performance.
Here are some better ideas":
“How else can you beat that player?”
“Try this next time and let me know how it went.”
“We’ve been stuggling on the breakout, how can we do better?”
When giving feedback, focus on coaching the process, not the outcomes. We want players to be good at understanding the process of what leads to success so they can become great at understanding the why behind what they are doing.
(6) Designing Environments
The environment is always the first teacher. The number one thing a coach can do to be more effective is to create a safe and enjoyable environment where learner opportunities abound.
Creating an environment where people are encouraged to make decisions. As we learned from Martin St Louis, a bad read (learning opportunity) is better than no read at all. Players must experience repetitions within an environment where each rep will be slightly different and thus require that player to adjust to the nuance. Action is preceeded by perception so they should always be coupled together.
A common coaching mistake I see made is requiring players to do something rather than encouraging or incentivizing players to do that something. Example:
Coaches that have teams that like to play 1v1 everywhere rather than passing do their best to get more passing in their teams so they require 3 passes before scoring in practice. Which is really silly when a player does a great job picking a pass to head on a breakaway and stops playing hockey to please the game rule.
Rather than requiring your team to make 3 passes before shooting, where they stop playing hockey to make the 3 passes before returning to play, what if we changed the scoring rules so that each pass made results in an extra goal. Make 3 passes then score, 4 goals! This has them making the risk/rewards calculation consistently like they would in a game.
All of the above has coaches creating better learning environments to help their players grow as players and people. Truly improving these skills of coaching helps make your players better on and off the ice.
Further Reading