Monday was a pretty busy day for me. For us up North, it was Thanksgiving but we don't really celebrate it with a big family gathering. Still, I got home at about 2 after having lunch out with friends, then spent a couple hours getting the backyard ready for Winter and then had to sit down and put together a practice plan for a team practice in the evening.
I had a mini meltdown as I was going through drills and drills for the practice. Felt seriously overwhelmed, simply freaking out not wanting to look like an idiot in front of these kids. It was going to be our first full ice practice after having one half ice practice last week.
I concentrated most of the drills on working on individual skills, mainly puck handling, passing and shooting. My thought was that if I get them to pass the puck around, they'll develop at least a bit of a sense of how they move and their timing will get better.
Felt nervous stepping on the ice but it went away after one drill. We got a good group of kids. They want to have fun but not stupid fun. I told them my usual message: give me what you got, push hard, apply yourself.
They did and the practice was a lot fun, I think for them as well as for me.
I approached Alex Fa to play defense as the kids were warming up on the ice and he was open to it so I had him work on defence for the drills that needed a defenceman. Since I was a denfenceman in my youth, I have a better idea of the basics for the position and when we did some 2 on 1 drills I tried to help the kids. One thing I want them to do, especially on a 2 on 1 going down to our goals, is to pay attention to the guy who doesn't have the puck and leave the shooter to Andrew. Andrew can handle a shot one on one but if the other guy goes out wide, this will him having to do a miracle save. I also want them that getting the puck out of our defensive zone is the priority. Kids at that level of play have a tendency to try and get cute with the puck sometimes. This leads to defensive turnovers and you can only survive a certain number of times giving the puck back to your opponent inside your defensive zone. I want them to know that after 3-4 times being uneffective at trying to get the puck out, I have no problem with them dumping the puck down the other end even though this might get called back and we'd have to play a face off down in our defensive zone. At least with a face off we'll be able to regroup and start anew.
Quick survey in the locker room and with my assistant after practice tells me it was a well spent hour on the ice. Kids told me they liked getting to touch the puck a lot. Had no reason to freak out heh, is just how I am...
Next game is this upcoming Saturday at 9 pm so a pretty late game. We are playing Éclaireurs-1 this week. Their association's territory covers the center to east edge of the city of Lévis while ours covers the central, most populated portion of the city and the west side of it. There's also a third association in Lévis, Husky, which get their players from the most eastern eadge of the city. The city of Lévis merged many smaller towns together a few years ago and that's one of the reason why things remain kind of separated that way to this day.
The Éclaireurs teams have one very old hockey rink as their main home ice but it's not enough and similar to us last week, they often end up playing home games away from home. It will be the case this weekend as we will be playing away on one of our two home ices. Will feel weird...
Looking ahead at that Éclaireurs-1 team, it's a game we have a great shot at winning. They are 1-1 so far this season after beating the girl team only 3-1 and losing 6-2 against another Éclaireurs team. I plan on reminding the kids that we can win this game but we need to play as a team and to work hard all game long. This will remain my theme all season long.
In other news, I'm learning stuff about this coaching thing all the time. I learned yesterday than the team needs to have TWO registered coaches on their rank. I have through the first two parts of the process of becomming a registered coach which were online video trainings. I'm now booked for a full day of training that will happen next October 25th. That day will include a theoretical portion as well as a practical session on the ice. I'm actually kinda looking forward to that day. From what I learned during the online video session, I should get a handbook with drills on that day. This will help me put together practcie sessions.
One of my assistant also need to be registered. I don't know for how long the registration is godo but you don't need to take the class every season. The registrar of our association gave me 4 names of dads who had been registered in the past but none of them showed the tiniest bit of interest to get involved with coaching their son's team. That's kinda sad. One of them even told me point blank that he would "never ever give one minute of his time to coaching" after a bad season last year. Sigh... Noe of the three dads who came forward and offered to help are registered coaches but the good news is one of them agreed yesterday evening to go through the registration process.
The other good news I learned last weekend is that every team is allowed one tracksuit for one of their coaches. It's usually for the head coach but if he's already got one, from having coaches in a previous season, he can transfer the privilege to an assistant. No need to say, I don't have such a tracksuit. I picked it up Wednesday and it looks pretty good. Dark blue windjacket and sport pants. I'll look real sharp on our next practice, next Tuesday.
FM