Last Updated on Wednesday, 16 March 2016 15:37
By Kevin Hartzell
Let’s Play Hockey Columnist
My first thought for the week is to congratulate and thank Gina Boots for her submission in last week’s edition of Let’s Play Hockey. Her articulation of her perspective was awesome. The issue with parents being too involved or just “too” has always been and always will be. I hope and wish her words will help. But I have my strong reservations.
The best of parents have many of the same impulses to protect their own and to hope for success for their own kids; they just channel their impulses in healthier ways. If you are a parent of a young hockey player, I would urge you to go back and read Gina’s words from a week ago. The problem is that the parents who need to read this the most will either not read it or assume that the subject matter refers to those “other” people. It is a frustrating subject because the ones who don’t get it, don’t get it.
Let me digress … slightly. The same lack of vision and understanding affects players. Players with vision see what they do and also see much of what they cannot or did not accomplish. The players without vision mostly see neither. Players like Wayne Gretzky saw most everything. The remainder of us saw anywhere from less than Gretzky to quite a bit less. Players without vision go home not understanding many things. If the parent shares in the lack of vision and/or understanding with their player, well, then you have a problem at home and at times it is directed at the coach.
Then of course there is the parent who is convinced they know more. Some do know a lot. But on the outside looking in, even the “educated” parent doesn’t see what a staff of coaches sees.
I will give you one quick example from my experience with the high school girls’ hockey team this year. Our girls were great and I loved every minute of working with them, but there were days where some of our girls showed up for practice greatly distracted. Now, I don’t blame them. They came right from school and had just a short amount of time to get dressed and to the ice. School takes focus. Girls who are dedicated to school use the focus they need to accomplish what needs accomplishing.
Especially with our younger players, there were days they just couldn’t make the transition to the focus needed for an elite level hockey practice. Our senior girls who overall were pretty mature, were much better at making that daily transition to practice. Consequently, they were more dependable and reliable in learning and applying the team concepts the staff was emphasizing.
Being reliable and dependable are the most valuable traits in any player. Had I not seen this firsthand for myself, I wouldn’t know what this looked like for this team. But to see it at all, you had to have a viewing perch at our practices daily. Seeing what we saw, one would better understand the added confidence we showed in our seniors, and not just because they were “seniors.”
No one sees it all. A good coaching staff has different views and vantage points for each member coach. If they as a staff share these perspectives with each other and challenge each other based upon their unique point of view, they have a better chance to coach their team positively.
If parents would stick to being parents and understand there is a lot more they don’t see than what they do see, and keep most of their partially educated opinions mostly to themselves, the chances of positive team outcomes would increase also.
Our players are young and very few have the wisdom and vision to see things as they actually are. That’s why they need us, both coaches and parents, to help them see things for what they really are and deal with them appropriately.
Skippers Win AA Bantam State Championship … again
I attended the State Championship Bantam AA game Sunday. The final game featured Minnetonka against a scrappy Moorhead squad. The Skippers won 3-2 in two overtimes. It was an exciting game for all of us in attendance.
I went in part to see some of my Minnetonka friends and find out what is going on that Minnetonka again has such a good Bantam team (two state championships in a row now.) I talked a bit with my good friend and former Gopher teammate, Jeff Teal.
Jeff has for some time now worked with the association in player development. While I didn’t learn anything earth shattering, I did hear from Jeff about the association’s good fortune with coaches. He thinks the association has had good coaches all the way from Squirts to Bantams. It was obvious to me that they have a good and gritty bunch of athletes to be sure.
I also was told by a couple of other Skipper supporters that they are lucky to have knowledgeable former players like Tim Hanus (among others) who have worked with this group and others way back when they were Mites and Squirts.
I do believe putting great and knowledgeable coaches at the younger levels is one of the great ideas that can be employed by any hockey association. Based upon the past couple of Bantam AA seasons, Minnetonka is doing this all very well.
Kevin Hartzell is the director of player development for the NA3HL’s Twin City Steel. A St. Paul native and forward for the University of Minnesota from 1978-82, Hartzell coached in the USHL from 1983-89 with the St. Paul Vulcans and from 2005-12 with the Sioux Falls Stampede. He was the head coach of Lillehammer in Norway’s GET-Ligaen from 2012-14. His columns have appeared in Let’s Play Hockey since the late 1980s. His book “Leading From the Ice” is available at amazon.com
