Some of my early teaching years were spent bouncing between senior high
school and grades 5-8. The most difficult adjustment had nothing to do
with curriculum, timetables or class sizes. It was learning how to
change the approach from dealing with adolescents to little kids and
back again, sometimes in the same day.
This is what teachers do
though. They’re professionals, usually well trained, and armed with
considerable support mechanisms. Often teachers spend their formative
years in the profession doing exactly what I did before narrowing their
preferred grade levels.
In minor hockey however, we see a rather
different model, one that forces (or should force) coaches to adapt to
new age groups almost annually. For instance, the majority of coaches at
the younger age levels, pee wee and under, coach their own children’s
teams. Each season they go to the next age group with their kids until
either the coach or child says enough.
As coaches learn all too
quickly, the six months between seasons can bring about a host of
changes in kids. The squeaky-voiced 12 year old in March returns in
September with a stubble beard and a body ripped from summer workouts.
Because coaches generally only know the age groups their own kids are
in, moving up to a new one is not straightforward. This is one of the
weaknesses in our volunteer system. Our coaches know they need to adapt
just from watching their own children change. But how?
From a
technical standpoint, there’s plenty of guidance available. Hockey
Canada and its branches provide charts and skill inventories that are
excellent starting points. Here’s what you teach atoms, but here’s what
you should be teaching pee wees, etc. It’s impossible though to come up
with a definitive chart for a particular level or team. The coaches are
left on their own.
To make it even more challenging, a coach may
have a recreational bantam team one year and the next season his son
makes the lowest tier midget competitive team. Aside from the leap of 14
to 15 year olds, this coach has to deal with a far different set of
expectations and skills. It may be that only his child and a couple of
others succeeded in going a level up. The rest have long histories in
competitive hockey. They want more and expect more. A coach from a house
league setting may not be properly equipped to effectively make that
leap.
With little or no prior experience at either an older or
better calibre group (let alone both), a coach is left with a difficult
challenge. Retooling is easy to say, not so easy to do.
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