Mental Aspects of Ice Hockey: 2nd Level Learning & Mid Season Hurdles

In the perfect world of La-La, talking to your child calmly fixes everything. That doesn’t always work on Earth for parents or coaches. If it did, I would be out of work. We are dealing with 10-12 year olds. Although their capacity to understand increases and their ability to manage themselves improves, they are still kids and problems still arise. In youth ice hockey the problems, if they are big, small, or indifferent annoyances, influence and affect both the individual player and the team. They have to be addressed if they surface or if they get in the way. The problem can be looked at as a hurdle and should be related to skills. I was asked on two levels (child & team) how do you deal with…

There are two kinds of problems, to simplify let’s say there are only pattern problems and single events. Single events are easily handled. A player messes up, the coach or parent or both talks with the child, the behaviors go away for a long time. Maybe the player also gets a time-out of sorts. Then there is the pattern problem. This is when a player exhibits the same behavior over and over and over again. Talking doesn’t really work. Short time-outs don’t really work. Yelling doesn’t work. The problem repeats. The latter, is the issue I will tackle under the mental aspects of ice hockey. You have to discern between behavior problems and difficulty with executing skills.

Now let me complicate it a bit more. There are two types of pattern problems. One being what the team isn’t doing as a team. That may be for example, as with most youth teams, not using the pass effectively or bunching up. The other being what a player(s) is doing individually, that is, their behavior and not a hockey related skill issue. I will take the easy way out and option out of talking about problematic players. I will focus on the team as being one player. The team is an entity. The team example does work for a single child that is having trouble with specific hockey goals too, not to be confused with the child having non-hockey behavior issues. You can follow the example below as for a team or a child with hockey goal issues.

First, as a coach, you teach and preach the purpose, the method, and you have the team practice and develop the skill. This is fairly standard. If you take time to make sure you covered this piece fairly well, not perfectly, but fairly well then the team as whole should be on the same page. All coaches have skill plans. All players are introduced to the plan in stages and as one group. So far so good… standard teaching.

The mental aspect of team patterns begin to take hold around mid-season. The entity or the team now has three heads, come mid-season. You have heads that get it, that mostly get it and those that partially get it. They all get it. They just vary in degrees of putting it into game play action. At this point the skills have been effectively taught and practiced. Frustration begins to surface among coaches, players, and parents. Frustration isn’t good or bad, it is just there. In four years of youth hockey, I see it every year. Now granted winning, (winning has value in this case only) makes all the difference on how well people manage their frustration. That is a topic for another blog entry. For the single child, at this point, the three heads are various skills. They get a skill,  they mostly get a skill, and they partially get a skill. What is the hurdle they or the team needs to overcome? Sometimes identifying the hurdle or breakdown is more important the reviewing the skill.

A losing season leads to chaos. A mostly winning seasons leads to rumblings here and there. In either case the volunteer, I said volunteer, coaches begin to feel and catch the frustration. This is where 10-12 years old have the opportunity to make and individually change for the team (this helps the child and team clear hurdles). They need help to change. The child knows the frustration is there. They need help because they have gone through one level of learning. Now they are stuck at taking what they have learned and regularly putting it into their weekly team game play. And this is where everyone takes a breath and remembers this is a game and the players are being taught to play. Most players just need help.

So, how do you get the players through the second level of learning? You use rewards and consequence based on clearly defined goals determined by the coaching staff. Not determined by the parents or the players but by the coaches. All pieces have to be clearly thought out and fully explained to the players. And they must view and take the plan, rewards, and consequences seriously. Get them all on the next page. It is page turning time. This is what is done for the team to get to that 2nd level or learning. For the child individually working at home, you don't create punishment or consequences. You use rewards and excitement when they do something they have been working on. Help them set the goals and celebrate when they execute the skill they have been having difficulty using in a game.

The young player needs structure, predictability, and a sense of fair accountability. This allows them to focus on a game plan and on themselves. Without this, a team can breakdown. This is most predominant in classrooms. The principles of teaching are however the same for any group of kids. Players 10-12 years old have a good sense of fair accountability (another future blog entry).  It goes something like this, “well why should I do it if they aren’t and they don’t get in trouble.” I suppose you could go and continually punish a team or players but I think that isn’t quite rewarding.

Peewee players also recognize fairness through being rewarded for doing something right versus seeing someone punished that does it wrong. Let’s keep the issues of passing and position spacing upfront and in mind as goals. Rewards or consequences work well or better yet, a combination of both works best. The consequence should be mild but evident. The reward should be clear and predominate. They will see this as fair accountability.

Parents can help their child improve as a team player by teaching them to focus on themselves and not on the actions of others and by supporting the coaches’ plan. They can have their own goals at home but have to support and focus on the team during practices and games. They can understand the difference with help.

Coaches can meet with the team and ask the players to work together to achieve the very specific goals  of A and B. Goals A and B are typically what has been taught for the 1st half of season but now it is time for everyone to be doing it fairly regularly, game in and game out. The players know the skills, they know how to physically do it, but they aren’t mentally able to pull it off consistently. This is a learning stage. This is a mental aspect of the game for the youth players. A plan needs to be designed to help them make it over the next hurdle.

You are pulling the players’ mental capacities into play and onto the ice by using an accountability plan with clear goals. You are reaching out to help them focus on improving their game by providing them with a plan, expectations, and rewards and consequences. At specific points of a season, it isn’t about teaching the actual skill, it is about pulling out their mental strength so the players can fully enact or use the skill in a game. It is about helping the player turn on the “ah-hah” switch. When done correctly, you see the three team heads go away and a lot of smiles from the players when the switch goes on. Methods to building a plan is yet another blog entry.

The mental aspects of the youth ice hockey go hand in hand with the development of physical skills. The best part of the mental game is, it has nothing to do with a player’s ice abilities and everything to do with hockey thinking. My belief is that the player that learns to think will become a player that begins to dominate when his or her skill level improves and their physical body develops. Children develop physically and mentally at different rates. At times, you have to know what part they need the most help with to improve their enjoyment of the game.