I have a learned a lot about youth ice hockey over the last 6 months. I understand the layers, barriers, problems, and most importantly the passion of the volunteers that make up the clubs and league. I know that people care. I also know that change is difficult and change needs to be made to help protect the children. But change also needs to come to help keep children engaged in ice hockey. We need additional events to continually teach them a highly skilled game. The complexity of skills needed to be a hockey player requires additional teaching formats. As parents, we came up with a between season model to address the above.
We originally went to our club to express our safety concerns and I feel we are supported. How our concerns come to play out in the CBHL, is not the issue right now. I have researched youth hockey to death and found key themes; many players quit when checking occurs, hockey requires players to learn many skills, and checking over-shadows using and learning needed key skills. What does the latter mean? In a game setting the focus players have to put on checking (either checking or avoiding checking) inhibits the full development of other skills. Ill dig out the article later. Basically, it states a club that went to a non-checking format saw players skating, stick-handling, positioning, passing, and shooting skills and abilities improve drastically. Why? The kids could focus their energy on those aspects of the game and not on checking. It makes sense. The answer isn't just remove checking. The answer is to add additional events to engage and teach players.
As parents we wanted a between season event. Many of our kids only play hockey. We tried to develop a skills and non-checking scrimmage clinic. The goal was to give players a 16 session clinic to develop all the above aspects of their game in a full non-checking scrimmage. Our plan was to use 75 minute ice slots. The first 20 minutes would be about key elements of hockey and skills instruction. The remaining part of the session would be a full scrimmage that focused on non-checking game-play and that day's skill-de-jour. It would be a competitive non-checking scrimmage to practice the bazillion other key skills of hockey. Our goal was to add 8 more weeks of hockey to engage and teach the youth players. Our hopes were to maintain their passion, teach them, let them have fun, and remove the checking as a method allow the players to fully focus on the other skills needed to play hockey well. Not a bad idea. Right?
Well we got the ice time. Found 2 coaches. Found interested parents to volunteer to help out. Found players. And then found out insurance would be about $5000. Insurance was the deal buster. All of a sudden it went from like $400 a player to $800 a player. Talk about a barrier to keeping kids involved in hockey... We did find that Metro hockey is offering a similar program with 18 sessions; power skating, skills, and scrimmage. But I don't know Metro hockey.
So here we sit today with an idea for a between season event to teach youth players how to be more skilled and make for a better season next year. We plan to talk to our club and see if they are interested in our idea. They may be too exhausted from managing the season. We would like to fill the gap between the travel season with skills, skills and more skills development. I appreciate the past feedback, I have gotten from readers. I would appreciate help, in figuring out how to make this between season event work. I believe in addressing safety issues but I also believe (and learned) we really need to continually teach our players and keep them engaged in youth hockey. Improving safety doesn't exclude expanding hockey events.
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