Jack Blatherwick

If you don’t see a play, make one up

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Last Updated on Sunday, 27 May 2012 23:31

By Jack Blatherwick

Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

Perhaps the most common advice from coaches about offensive attack is, “If you don’t see a play as you approach the blue line, get it deep.”

Let’s face it: Creativity in hockey comes from the players, not the coaches, who are more likely to advocate, “Keep it simple. Dump it in. Chip it out. Move the puck. Ring it. Use the glass.” Of course, none of these is bad advice at the right time … just not all the time.

So, let’s experiment with a new vocabulary in summer hockey, where development and fun are all that matter, and winning is irrelevant. The advice should be, “Never dump it; find a play. Pull the defense out of position; make them react to you; and pass indirectly to one of your linemates who fills the lane.” 

If you’re a defenseman, “Never ring it in the summer; make every pass directly to your teammate’s stick. Don’t move it quickly; protect the puck and move it brilliantly. Never use the glass in the summer or just dump it up the boards; extend your present limits. Improve your puck control; don’t even ice it when you’re shorthanded. Why give the puck to the other team and let them improve their skills?”

There is plenty of time before next season’s important section playoff games to discover you have certain limits and modify your game to give your team the best chance to win.

Because of what I write most often, it is assumed I believe skating, strength training and quickness are the most important attributes for success in hockey. To set the record straight, nothing is as important as rink sense and the desire to dominate with the puck and score goals. 

Nothing comes close. Puck control, scoring goals,and making creative plays are the things that develop passion for the game. This should be every player’s major goal for the summer. This is what makes you want to play better defense – to get the puck back right away. This is what makes you train extra hard to skate faster, to shoot harder, to handle the puck better, to gain strength. 

No one puts in long hours just to become a better backchecker; you backcheck because it is essential to winning. You train in the summer to be more like Pavel Datsyuk or Patrick Kane.

Consider Kane’s decision when the coaches at USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program thought, “He played differently than most kids. He liked to hold onto the puck” (from an article by Tim Struby in ESPN The Magazine, 2010).  Kane believed he had the ability to carry the puck, make the defense commit to him because of his speed and pass to teammates who took advantage of the opening he created. In Kane’s words, the NTDP was about “… gritty, dump-and-chase, get-goals-in-front-of-the-net hockey.”

So unlike most 16-year-olds with less resolve to be the best, Kane asked in a meeting with the coaches that he be allowed to play his own game. The result? “He had incredible hockey sense,” said John Hynes, the head coach.  “He wanted the freedom to do what he does. He was gifted, so we allowed it.”

So, how does someone become gifted?

In the summer, at least, remove those restrictions that winter coaches impose on your creativity, and therefore your growth as a player. This is everyone’s highest priority for offseason development.

Visit Jack’s website at www.overspeed.info.

Lopsided scores? It’s a non-issue

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Last Updated on Sunday, 27 May 2012 23:31

By Jack Blatherwick

Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

I’ve been asked several times over the years, “What do you think about that 15-0 score?” 

You know what? I think there’s absolutely nothing significant about it. It’s not a topic that deserves space in a hockey publication, but I’ve written some pretty undeserving columns before, so here goes.

No athlete is psychologically scarred by playing on a hockey team that gets trounced, no matter what the score, and no matter what the age. It’s a ridiculous thought, and we should put an end to running time and other schemes to “protect young kids from the trauma.” There is no trauma.

But certainly, the winning coach should not be accused of “running up a score.” Scoring is the object of the game, and there is already too little attention paid to producing goal scorers in Minnesota. 

No doubt, lopsided competition is not productive for either team; so I have a creative solution: Don’t schedule these games.

Administrators are just being lazy by scheduling games in which the lopsided outcome is known in advance. There are high school conferences that have had this issue for decades – games involving the same mismatched teams each year, and the AD’s sleep through it all. They like to rubberstamp the schedule for all sports in one clean swoop. Then, some AD’s with a football/basketball background (that’s 99 percent of all AD’s, of course) actually say the same factors should apply in hockey as in other sports.

Hockey is not one of the sports where the winning coach has constructive control of a lopsided score. Track coaches share this non-issue with hockey. They don’t say to their mile relay team in the last event, “OK, I want you to run your worst time ever, because the team score is getting out of hand.”

Nor does a wrestling coach tell his heavyweight, “Go out there, shake hands, and when the ref gives the signal to wrestle, just flop down on your back and get pinned, so the other team won’t be embarrassed by the score.” 

Coaches of golf, tennis, skiing and cross-country are all in the same boat.  Imagine a coach trying to keep the team golf score down … like, kick your team-mate’s golf ball in the hazard? 

A lopsided score is not a coaching issue in many sports, including hockey; all that matters is for each athlete to focus on his/her best performance and forget the score.

On the other hand, football, basketball and soccer coaches can, and should play their second string or maybe the third. This fall, I watched the St. Thomas seventh-grade football coaches actually risk losing in the last seconds with the opponent’s ball on the Tommies’ one-yard line. They kept all their top players on the sideline, to give others a chance. Hats off to some true educators. 

However, hockey is a different sport, and coaches must rotate lines. Furthermore, the second/third-line players are like piranha in these games, and are more likely to score than the first line. Good for them. Play on!

At one time in history, there was a 10-goal rule in the high school league. As soon as the differential reached 10, at any point in the game, the whistle blew, refs departed, the two teams lined up to shake hands and everyone in the stands wondered, “Huh?  What happened?” 

Personally, as a coach, I know that one well. It was a playoff game at Braemar, and the band kept playing that monotonous Hornet fight song after each goal.  (Sorry Hornets, it’s a good song – just a little monotonous that evening). 

Finally, with one minute left, the 10th goal hit the back of the net. We shook hands and were off to the golf course.  Someone at the high school league decided this would be kindler and gentler than playing out the last minute.

Another brilliant 10-goal policy was implemented by a team we won’t name. You were no longer allowed to shoot when the differential reached 10.

Of course, this made it a lot less damaging to fragile psyches when an opposing player skated through everyone, deked your goalie, then turned back toward the other net and skated through everyone on the return trip. Brilliant solution to a non-problem.

About those damaged psyches: A half century ago, the high school team I coached had no chance against varsity opponents, so we forfeited to many varsity teams and had constructive games with their JV’s. However, we did play some varsities, and we endured some lopsided losses – big-time lopsided. 

At a recent gathering of alumni from those teams, it was fun to see that some had become billionaires in business; some were physicians, lawyers, teachers, ranchers, farmers and even politicians. None played in the NHL, but there was a team owner in the group. I asked them if they had been through a lot of counseling over the decades to help cope with those lopsided losses.

“Are you kidding?” one of them said as he slapped my shoulder. “We knew it was your fault.”

Visit Jack’s website at www.overspeed.info.

Gopher sports have mapped out a difficult road with their fuzzy math

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Last Updated on Sunday, 27 May 2012 23:31

By Jack Blatherwick

Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

It is our birthright as uninformed spectators to criticize the coach. I learned this lesson in the late 1940s as I tagged along with my father to watch Golden Gopher football and hockey games.

Cigar smoking fans at Memorial Stadium booed legendary coach Bernie Bierman for the smallest of failures. After all, this was a national championship program, perhaps the most powerful football team in history, and the bar was raised to such heights that boos were heard when the Gophers failed to convert on third down.

Don Lucia raised the bar of Gopher hockey tradition another level with back-to-back national championships, but like all champions, there would be leaner days ahead. And, as if defeating every opponent isn’t hard enough, NHL teams started to entice players to sign for money that no average college graduate is going to earn in a lifetime. 

I do not write to defend or villainize the coach. Anyone who has lost as many games as a head coach as I have is permanently barred from the blogs where expertise is cheap. My only source of credible information comes from former Gophers who played for Don. They think Lucia and his staff are excellent, but what do players know?

Nor can I contribute much about the embattled athletic director Joel Maturi, about whom much has been written. As has always been the case, college AD’s are judged publicly by the performance of college athletes. This is kinda like judging teachers by the performance of 10-year-olds.

The new wrinkle, for which the AD is judged behind closed doors, is the management of an impossible financial obligation inherent in the pressure to keep up with the Joneses of big-time sports (aka the Texas Longhorns and New York Yankees). This requires paying millions to overrated coaches and building monumental arenas and stadiums to enhance recruiting. 

Having observed Gopher sports over the decades, from the perspective of a student, fan and assistant coach, I can assure you that the present athletic director is failing miserably in his efforts to deal with an impossible situation. The debt and financial pressures have never been worse, and the ticket inflation to deal with this problem have never been as distasteful to a public that demanded high-cost coaches and stadiums. This is the Gopher version of the national debt: We demanded it all, but forgot that it would come at a cost.

There was a time when high school football coaches brought their teams to Gopher games for 50 cents a head. Imagine 5,000 athletes cheering as one loud voice for Gopher teams that went on to win national championships. During the hockey season, a youth coach would bring a station wagon (with wood side trim) full of future high school stars to watch legends like John Mayasich, Ken Yackel and Jack McCartan. 

No wonder young Minnesota athletes would give anything to eventually play in maroon and gold uniforms. This was all they saw growing up, and tickets were affordable. 

The athletic director’s job of balancing the financial books must have been a simpler matter in those days, something that could be finished by noon, because the job description for one AD actually included coaching the freshman hockey team.

That’s about the time of day our present administration is having lunch with loyal supporters, convincing them that loyalty includes purchasing season tickets at prices that would be embarrassing to enunciate clearly. 

“Therefore we’ve come up with some fuzzy math to explain, ‘Your tickets are going to cost about a thousand bucks more than it says (clearly) on the ticket.  But, of course, this is tax deductible, and these prices will be reduced in the future. Trust us. You know how everything we sell is getting cheaper.’”

In 1972, Gopher hockey finished last in the conference standings and last in attendance. The next year, Herb Brooks was hired to turn things around, and one of his first questions to athletic director Paul Giel was, “How inexpensively can we sell student tickets and general admission?” 

His thoughts reflected simple east-side logic, “We can win if students and blue collar rowdies dominate the arena with noise and energy.” 

Giel, a former All-American running back and baseball pitcher, carried some rather quaint ideas forward from his playing days to the athletic department — ideas like “winning” and “students dominating the scene at college games.” He was an easy sell.

So the next winter, doors to the old arena opened at 6 p.m., and students raced against the general admission rowdies for the best seats in the balcony.  Heart rates, blood pressures and noise didn’t subside until visiting teams were “swept” out of the old basement dressing rooms of Williams Arena (later named Mariucci Arena). Gopher hockey was on a roll with three NCAA Championships in the next seven years.

Meanwhile, football was stumbling, as students were assigned to an anonymous corner in the Metrodome, the marching band was replaced with canned music, and the wonderful football tradition at Memorial Stadium was handed over to downtown businessmen. There was talk that the move off campus was the problem, but heck, you could kick a football from the West Bank campus to the Dome.

The problem was that the college game no longer belonged to students. Finances were beginning to rule the future.

Hockey continued to win and fill seats, but then came a new phenomenon in Gopher sports: search committees. Yes, search committees began looking all over the country – everywhere but Minnesota – for big-time athletic directors.

As committees often do, they congratulated themselves for discovering a couple Ohio crooks named Rick Bay and Dan Meinert. I have no problem calling them crooks; I watched their act first hand. 

They were my bosses, and they turned Gopher sports into a “buy-now, pay-later casino.” They lived on credit cards and big plans: stadiums, arenas, elaborate practice facilities and more credit cards. By showing slideshows of the monuments they built in Minnesota, they were able to move “up” to higher places, an expression only used by non-Minnesotans brought in by search committees.

Bay, Meinert and the parade of losing football and basketball coaches brought Gopher sports painfully into the big-time competitive entertainment world where filling seats is all that matters. There were cheating scandals, payoffs to departed coaches, salaries that dwarfed the academic professionals and new buildings that raised ticket prices a thousand times. 

Football, basketball and hockey games will never again belong to students or to blue-collar youth coaches and their teams. Words like “general admission” are dropped from the dictionary.

Stakes are too high to halt the runaway spending now, and the athletic department deals on a constant basis with the question: How much can we raise prices before attendance drops too much? 

“Winning” takes on a different meaning in this new calculus. “If we win we can charge more for tickets. If we lose ... well, there’s always another search committee.”

Visit Jack’s website at www.overspeed.info.

Questions about smaller teams

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Last Updated on Sunday, 27 May 2012 23:31

By Jack Blatherwick

Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

After the column about smaller teams (LPH, Jan. 13), I received a very thoughtful email from a coach who has tried rosters of 10, and he pointed out certain problems:

(a) Skating seemed to deteriorate in games as players fatigued, because the 1:1 work:rest ratio didn’t allow for adequate recovery. 

(b) This meant that 80 percent of the practice time had to be spent on skating skills instead of 20 percent. 

(c) There was not enough time for systems, including PP and PK. 

(d) In practices, coaches used some competitive drills and small area games; but if some players didn’t show up for practice, the flow of the drill was non-productive. 

“How do we overcome these challenges?”

Thanks for your email.  I offer these additional thoughts:

1. Skating improvement is not a major priority in games, no matter what the work:rest ratio happens to be, so skating becomes a project for on-ice and off-ice practice. 

A consistent 1:1 work:rest ratio never occurs for extended periods of time in a game. Faceoffs change that ratio dramatically. More importantly, a player should never skate full speed up and down the ice, stopping and starting at each end, like a 40 second skating drill. If they do play like this, they need to learn how to think. Rink sense is much more important than effort.  

Getting fatigued in games a few times at 12 years old will help them learn to play smarter. Reduce the number of players on the roster, and rink sense will improve, because players will soon learn that a good shift is not defined by brain-dead hustle all over the ice; it is defined by the bottom line: productivity.

 Every great player in the NHL likely played more than half of each youth hockey game in which he participated (in other words the work:rest ratio was worse than 1:1). They also scrimmaged for hours on the pond without standing in a snow bank for long recovery periods. Yet they became great skaters and great players. They used their head while competing, coasting for a second or two when it was the right thing to do, sprinting only when it would do some good, coasting again and sprinting again to score or stop a goal. 

This has been verified by high speed film, which was analyzed by sports biomechanists. It showed that in the most intense games, players actually accelerate for less than 1.5 seconds (on average), then decelerate for about the same time (sometimes coasting, sometimes moving their feet), and this is repeated the entire shift.

2. To improve skating fundamentals we must learn how to utilize dryland activities. This is business as usaual for speedskating coaches around the world.  They realize that off-ice facilities are better suited than the ice for teaching and repeating certain neuromuscular patterns. This includes posture, knee bend, quick acceleration and the strength needed to explode from one leg. 

On the other hand, ice time is irreplacable when combining these n-m habits into an efficient skating stride. So, the combination of on-ice and off-ice skating practice develops a synergy of learning that can’t be matched by one or the other.

3. Systems like defensive zone coverage, plus PP and PK, should be taught in dryland and by using the whiteboard. Ice time for practices is limited in youth hockey. Don’t waste it on systems.

Practice time should be devoted to fundamental skill repetition with a minimum of standing around for explanation. Teach on the fly. Besides the obvious skating and stick skills, the really important skills include competitive instincts, toughness, creativity, rink sense, poise, puck protection and defensive skills. Those are all pre-requisites to be learned before systems. Your small area competitive drills are excellent for developing many of these.

4. When fewer players show up for games, make substitutions from other teams. Too few players for practice is never a problem. Just be ready with Plan B, and work with individuals and smaller groups. Be flexible; change both your practice purpose and drills. Before coming to the rink, prepare for anything. 

Pat Westrum had three teams with rosters of 10 players and a goalie, practice at the same time in Apple Valley. There were different tasks in the three different zones. It takes planning and coaches must work as hard as the player; but it is worth it, because ice time is the most important factor in development … after passion.

Finally, if youth hockey players do get tired in a game ... that is great! That would mean a hockey game becomes a fitness challenge, like soccer, basketball or lacrosse, where developing fitness is part of the mission. Presently, practices might qualify, but games do not.

Visit Jack’s website at www.overspeed.info.