Here’s the situation: many of you with children participating in minor hockey also have day jobs. Your team’s coaches, for any typical select or rep hockey team, are putting in 4+ days per week into their teams, in addition to practice planning, team management, budgeting, and interacting with parents (you). You’re already participating in the 4+ days per week, just getting your player to the rink on-time, sometimes having to leave work early, or having to take time off entirely due to an away-tournament.

Your team has a few areas of opportunity that parents and coaches are both keenly aware of. Progress is slower than you’d want or expect, despite your coaches doing and saying all the right things, and running all the right drills.

Players may be putting in the right effort, though it may be mixed.

Alternately, you may be playing on a recreational hockey team, and players may not be receptive to coaching or feedback since everyone cares about performance and progress to a different degree, and everyone paid the same amount to play. People feel like nobody has more or less authority than the next player. You may feel awkward taking charge even if you’re the organizer.

What gives?

Different Response to Different Voices

Many of you, in your day jobs, may have seen external voices at work. Your team or organization has been working on something for a while, with mixed success. A senior executive shares that someone from Deloitte, PWC, Bain, McKinsey, or any other consulting firm is coming in to help out.

You give a mini eye-roll as the first handful of interactions with said consultants consist largely of regurgitations of what has been discussed and developed by internal resources. You aren’t sure why stakeholders across your organization suddenly agree with and mobilize around old ideas, some of which may have been yours.

At first, in the back of your mind, you feel like this wasn’t the best use of company resources, because everything was already available.

Over time, your team or organization rallies around the ideas. They make significant progress. Subsequently, you personally are able to push forward your own objectives due to the progress being made.

Your perspective begins to change – the next time you’re encountering resistance to what should be a good idea, you’re considering proposing external consultants again because you now know it’ll help. Pretty big shift from the eye-roll from before.

Why Different Voices are Effective

Bringing in different voices to achieve an objective has been around since the concept of a modern organization or team.

In line with the regurgitation of internal ideas, in the example above, there are hundreds-to-thousands of drills available online for anyone to use, targeting any number of skills or areas of opportunity. And yet, head coaches globally continue to leverage external hockey skills specialists to maximize the performance of their team.

Why does it work? It’s impossible to pinpoint a single specific magic bullet, but here are some considerations:

• There are no universal “right answers” in how to approach hockey practices; some individuals simply respond better to different communication styles, explanations, and demonstration techniques
• Existing relationships can be taken for granted and even discounted, especially if those relationships are long-term (including with family or parent-coaches)
• Unknown consultants, or coaches, can bring a perspective of credibility and authority
• External consultants or coaches that spend time with a variety of teams and individuals in a variety of situations provide insight on the always-valued “what others are doing”
• Simply giving a team’s own coaching staff a “mental break” from a practice, just to observe and learn, can help rejuvenate and refocus. All professionals, including coaches, benefit from observing and learning from others in the field.

What to do

Like in your day job, you recognize that a different voice, different experiences, a perspective of credibility and “what others are doing”, and simply providing the coaching staff a “mental break” can all be valuable for the future success of your team.

If you’re on a coaching staff or are a team organizer, and this blog post resonates with you, reach out to us today. Based on your team’s unique situation, we custom-tailor practices to provide maximum, practical benefit.

If you’re a player, or a parent or family member of a player on the team, gently encourage external resources as a valuable, affordable option, to your team’s organizer or coaching staff. You may even want to take the same approach individually through small-group or private instruction.

There are many options available in all major hockey markets. Want to try someone else? In the GTA, we’d wholeheartedly recommend Hockey Extreme as another reputable option with a top-notch staff. You may find your team working with different external coaches and companies over the course of several seasons.

If your team doesn’t have the budget for outside help, and fundraising efforts aren’t an option, there are hockey coaching groups for coaches of all levels to connect on Facebook. It won’t provide an outside voice, necessarily, but may provide a means to learn and share perspectives.

Alternatively, send us an e-mail or Facebook chat, free of charge. Maybe we can suggest some options to help, or act as a sounding board. They may not include all of our demonstrations, perspectives and corrections, but the drills we run for some of our repeat customers are also available for you to take a look at.

It’s a long season, and bringing in an outside voice is an incredibly effective way of keeping your players coaches & organizers energized and engaged. Hope to hear from you soon.