Wednesday 15 June 2011

Coaches - Effective Practices

 CONSTANTLY STRESS IN PRACTICE:

  1. Respect, Trust and Passion
2        No short cuts – Constant work ethic

3        Move your skates at all time – no coasting

4        No play fighting, shooting puck, pushing, bad mouthing team mates at anytime

5        Pre ice 10 minutes before practice time

6        “Skill Lap” – Coach will tell you before practice, skills between drills

7        2 Whistles – Fast to Coach, last player does lap

8        Grab water and bring back to board, you drink while we teach

9        Extended whistle – “Stop where you are”

10    Listen, Learn and have FUN!   

Thursday 9 June 2011

Feeling anxious before a game? Good.

By: Paul Dennis
 
Before a game all athletes probably feel a little bit anxious. Some athletes think that that’s a bad thing. But all great players go through that experience.

What feeling anxious before a game is telling you is, that you’re excited about the game. Your arousal levels are increasing. This means you’re becoming more motivated. It’s important to have a little uncertainty in your mind. If there was no uncertainty in your mind then you would take your opponent for granted and you wouldn’t play as well. So having anxious thoughts prior to a game is a very, very good thing.

What’s bad is when you experience self-doubt prior to a game. When you start questioning yourself and thinking that if you make a mistake and don’t play well, people watching will judge you and think you’re unworthy.
Without a doubt an athlete’s worst enemy is self-doubt, self-criticism and the fear of failure.

More hockey information at Allstate - All Canadian.

Tuesday 7 June 2011

Handling Issues with a Coach

3 Steps for Handling Issues with a Coach

In every sport you will hear parents and players complain about “bad” coaches. We asked a long-term hockey director what parents should do when this situation arises. Read on for his advice.
First, you need to dissect what you mean that the coach “isn’t working out” or is a “bad coach.” Oftentimes, a close look at parents’ complaints reveals something other than an issue with development or the team’s win/loss record. Sometimes it’s a personal conflict with the coach. Other times it’s a belief that their player is not getting the ice time he or she deserves—or even that the player is not playing on the same line with his or her friends (or the parents’ friends)! There will always be situations in which a family believes the coach is not doing a good job—and sometimes it is a real concern.
When a real concern arises, follow these steps:
  1. First, speak with the team manager.
  2. If that doesn’t help, ask for a face-to-face meeting with the coach. It should not be a confrontational meeting, but more of a discussion of the issues.
  3. If you feel things are still not improving, ask for a meeting with your association’s hockey director or board member who handles these types of issues.
The best way to ensure that the discussion is honest, upfront and not behind the coach’s back is to make sure there is a good line of communication. I do believe all coaches—even the ones who might not be getting it done—want the player to have fun and develop.
Editor’s Note: Thank you to Angelo Ricci for sharing his 15 years of expertise as a hockey director in this article. Ricci is founder, head instructor and consultant for Ricci Hockey Consulting. With 20+ years experience as a skills and stickhandling coach, he conducts/oversees more than 40 programs year-round that develop over 1,000 players each year.

Friday 3 June 2011

Teaching is Knowing How Students Learn

SWENSDAY STUFF
Teaching is Knowing How Students Learn
Swen Nater
Click here to his Blog!

When Coach Wooden was a teen, he and his brothers worked on their father’s farm, doing chores such as plowing the field with a stubborn mule. On one occasion, Coach was working the field when the mule suddenly stopped in its tracks and refused to go any farther. Coach tried everything to get that animal to move but nothing worked. He tried pushing it, pulling it, and yelling at it but he was wasting his energy.

His father noticed and walked out to where they were. While Coach was catching his breath, Joshua Wooden walked to the front of his mule, looked it in the eye, began softly talking to it, and stroked its coarse hair on both jaws with both hands. He gently caressed its ears and then moved one hand under the jaw while the other moved up and down from between the eyes to just above the nose. Last, he walked back to the plow, took hold of the handles, and gently threw a wave into the long reigns. The mule moved forward and, after a few steps, he had Coach take over.

You can Google “How to plow a field” all you want but until you learn about mules, you’ll not get very far. Likewise, you can read all the books, listen to all the speeches, and attend all the classes you want, but until you learn about the student, you’ll have a difficult time teaching.
Although Phonics is a good way to teach some children proper decoding technique, some of its methods do not match up with how children think and reason. For example, when attempting to teach a child how to decode the middle two letters in the word, “bead,” Phonics give a clue,

“When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.”

The originators of Phonics didn’t study children enough. If they had, they would have come up with a much better approach, the method used by Read America in the program, Phono-Graphix®. 
Phono-Graphix® presents the English written code in a way children can understand, with no exceptions or rule breakers. In this program, for example, through a step-by-step method, children learn the various sounds the grapheme, “ea” (like in bead), can represent (the sound /ee/ like in read, and /e/ like in dead). That works 100% of the time. Isn’t that simple? Now when they read a new word like “bread,” they can try both sounds and choose the one that makes sense in the sentence.
That’s only a fraction of Phono-Graphix®, but all of it makes complete sense to children, even beginning readers. For more information on this program, visit http://www.readamerica.net.

Conclusion
Joshua Wooden taught his son how to understand the mule so he could get it to respond. It’s June and thousands of young people are graduating with degrees in education. Now it’s time for them to begin understanding students so they can get them to respond.  

It’s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.
John Wooden

Thursday 2 June 2011

Coaching = Teaching

“There is nothing mysterious about developing a good team, because coaching is nothing more than teaching. Coaches impart the techniques to the players. The better job they do, the better job the players will do.” —John McKay, former college and professional football coach
Young athletes expect coaches to help them satisfy their desire to become as skilled as possible. Therefore, you must establish your teaching role as early as possible. In doing this, emphasize the fun and learning part of sport, and let your athletes know that a primary coaching goal is to help them develop their athletic potential.

All Athletes Need Attention
During each practice or game, be sure that every youngster gets recognized at least once. Athletes who usually get the most recognition are (a) stars or (b) those who are causing problems. Average athletes need attention, too! A good technique is to occasionally keep a count of how often you talk with each athlete to make sure that your personal contact is being appropriately distributed.
Key Teaching Principles
Based on over 25 years of research and experience, several principles have been identified for creating a mastery climate—a learning environment that emphasizes skill development, personal and team success, maximum effort, and fun in youth sports.
  • Always give instructions positively.
  • When giving instructions, be clear and concise.
  • If possible, show athletes the correct technique (demonstrate).
  • Reinforce effort and progress.
Give Athletes Support
When an athlete has had a poor practice or a rough game (as we all have), the youngster should not go home feeling badly.
  • The player should get some kind of support from you—a pat on the back, a kind word (“Hey, we’re going to work that out. I know what you’re going through, but everyone has days like that sometimes.”)
  • Athletes should not leave feeling detached from you or feeling like a “loser.”
Editor’s Note: Thank you to Frank L. Smoll, Ph.D., for this article. Dr. Smoll is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and co-director of the Youth Enrichment in Sports program (www.y-e-sports.com). See a preview of his Mastery Approach to Coaching DVD here.

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