Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Highland Bantam Tryouts and the Icebreakers Begin

After coming from one of the largest hockey associations in Eden Prairie to coaching hockey in Israel, this year will be a new and exciting adventure for which I am very happy to begin. Having the opportunity to change pace and go to a smaller association like Highland Central and coaching the Banta, B1s, and also working with women who only began playing a few years ago, is going to challenge me in ways that can only improve my coaching skills.

Highland Bantam Tryouts
Highland Central has a different process for running their tryouts. Instead of hiring outside evaluators to tell the coaches which players they will have, they allow the coaches to have full control over who is on their team. This process is known as the "Bantam Prospect Camp" and consists of placing all the players on three evenly balanced teams. Each team is assigned a coach (I am assigned to the "white" team), and practices with another one of the prospect camp teams. Each team is given 14 sessions, and coaches can attend all the team's sessions if they choose. We are told to choose our team based on these sessions.

The hardest part of this process is that we must not only organize all our sessions, but also grade the players while on the ice. What we have done is have some sessions where we run skill-oriented practices, and others where we scrimmage. For some the Bantam A coach and myself are on the ice, and others we sit in the stands to grade. We split the kids into four lists (for our own sake): A, A/B, B/C, and C. The hardest part are the "bubble" kids, or those kids who could play up but we aren't sure yet.

After getting off the ice tonight we are hoping to cut tryouts short so we can start team practices. The Bantam A's start games as early as November 1st, and my team has a tournament starting October 30th in Breezy Point.

WHAM Icebreakers
This is going to be such a fun team to coach! The team consists of women ages 25+, most of whom just began playing hockey a couple years back. Our practices, right now, are all skill oriented (skating, shooting, and passing). I have no idea when we will get into team oriented drills, but right now focusing on skills is the way to go.

Like some of the women have told me, they are much more fun to coach because "there won't be calls from parents and we can legally drink". One of my favorite things so far is that one of the gals came on the ice wearing a Spongebob jersey! Only in womens hockey, eh?

Games begin soon, and that is where I will really see how they match up to everyone else. Hopefully we can make it to playoffs!

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