Nurturing mental toughness

Viking kicker Blair Walsh, after his missed kick last year.

Hi gang,

Forgive me as I and the rest of New England continue to recuperate from our Super Bowl celebrations. Whether you're a Patriots fan or not (and no, Mark Wahlberg, you're not), you've got to admit that was one hell of a comeback.

The numbers alone say it was the greatest comeback ever in Super Bowl history. Regardless of the numbers, the game revealed this team's intestinal fortitude. Courage. Toughness. It reminded me of the following column, which I wrote about a year ago.

Minnesota Viking Blair Walsh had a similar opportunity to win a playoff game for his squad. But he missed a 27-yard field goal attempt, and the Seattle Seahawks won the game. The column was inspired not by the missed kicked, but by how Walsh rebounded, and how we can all learned to be mentally tougher. (As a nice side note, Walsh was just signed by, of all teams, the Seahawks). I hope Matty Ryan and the Falcons can bounce back as well.

Let me know what you think. Thanks!

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Nurturing mental toughness

Mental toughness is something we all like to think we have. But the reality is we often don't know if we've got "it" or not until we're put on the spot, when the outcome of a game falls squarely on our shoulders. Ask Minnesota Viking place kicker Blair Walsh about pressure.

It was Walsh who missed a 27-yard chip-shot field goal attempt that would have knocked the defending NFC champion Seattle Seahawks out of this year's NFL playoffs. It didn't matter that Walsh is a very good kicker, hitting 87 percent of his field goal attempts in 2015, including six of eight from beyond 50 yards (for his career, he is 121 of 142, or slightly more than 85 percent). When the big pressure moment came, Walsh's kick went horribly awry, spinning wide left.

To his credit, Walsh didn't hide, and didn't make any excuses (some analysts thought Walsh was done in because the holder left the football's laces facing Walsh's boot). "I'm the one who didn't do my job," he told the collective media.

Of course, Walsh was excoriated on the Internet by cowards with keyboards. That's life in pro sports these days. As Ryan Hiles, a columnist for the Louisville Cardinal (the independent weekly student newspaper of the University of Louisville) wrote, "There's no denying that Internet shaming is now a part of sports."

"It's worth noting when we as a society become comfortable with a certain level of emotional sadism mixed into our daily lives," wrote Hiles. "Sadly enough, we can all be deemed guilty of this sadism to a certain extent. It's become almost a sport of its own to revel in the pain of someone far off with whom we share no relationship or connection."

That's unfortunate, but not surprising, given the general decline is basic human decency over the past two decades (just take a glimpse at any political debate for a refresher course). While maybe not ubiquitous, this rush to judge certainly seems more prevalent.

There is hope, however. A group of Minnesota first-graders, recognizing how devastating Walsh's missed field goal attempt must have been, wrote consoling notes to the place kicker, who returned the favor by visiting their classroom. Hiles, the college columnist, got it too.

"This isn't a plea to stop hurting the feelings of millionaires," he wrote. "They're grown-ups, and they can handle their own. They don't need the kind of crusader-like defense that some sports often inspire. Perhaps it's still worth it to think about how eager we are to exploit human misery for a laugh. More importantly, to those of you that take the time out of your day to take to social media and add to the madness, chew on this: what's the point?"

Which brings me to hockey, at almost every level. Like Hiles pointed out, millionaires chasing pucks at the NHL level don't need our pity (though it wouldn't hurt to keep in mind that, yes, they do have feelings). I'm more interested in the kids playing at the youth, middle school, high school, and even college levels. This ridiculous need to point fingers and assign blame has filtered down to the sport's youngest participants, and it's helping to squeeze the life, and the fun, out of our game.

My coaching colleagues and I see this all the time. Given the fact that we work with goaltenders, the most pressure-packed position in sports, that's almost expected. You have to be tough-skinned to play goal. The worst is the email sent from a parent, saying a son or daughter has left the sport because it's no longer fun. How crazy is that?

Yet I'm as guilty as the next "hockey dad." I constantly have to remind myself that my 16-year-old plays the game because she loves it, not because she thinks she's the next Angela Ruggiero. While I try to justify my critiques with the rationalization that "the better you are, the more you'll enjoy the game," even I have trouble believing that logic sometimes. The look in my daughter's eyes says it all. I need to learn when to back off.

Similarly, Dr. Robyn Odegaard, founder of the Stop the Drama campaign (stopthedramanow.com), wants to make sure that coaches and parents (and players) aren't confusing maniacal training with mental toughness.

"I've been very disappointing in what I've seen athletes and even coaches talking about when they talk about mental toughness, things like being forced to run until they throw up," said Odegaard. "Anything that you do physically, whether it's working out to exhaustion in the gym, or anything else, isn't going to increase your mental toughness. It may let you know if you have mental toughness or not, or it may break you if you don't have mental toughness, but it won't change your mental toughness.

"In order to actually increase your mental toughness, you need to understand what you're doing to decrease it," she said. "One of the skills I teach is how to tell the difference between evaluation and performance, and make sure you're doing them one at a time."

Evaluation, said Odegaard, is looking back on a play, and determining whether you did it correctly and what you can change to improve. Performance, meanwhile, is the act of actually doing something.

"Your brain can actually only do one at a time, not both," said Odegaard. "But how often, during a competition, have you thought, 'That was dumb. I wonder what coach is going to think? Will he pull me out of the game?'

"That means you're evaluating. You're looking backwards," she said. "Performance means, 'What do I have to do in the next 10 seconds to be successful?' Being able to take control of your thought process increases mental toughness, not running until you make yourself sick."

To take control of their "thought process," young players need to be given the freedom to make mistakes without feeling like the results of the game is their sole responsibility. I tell my daughter, and the freshmen goalies on her squad, "You win as a team, and you lose as a team." That's not coach-speak; it's the truth. There are plays throughout the game that determine the final score. And even if they do lose, it's not the end of the world.

In other words, ease up. It is just a game. If a group of first-graders in Minnesota, and a college columnist from Louisville, Kentucky, can understand that, so can we.

FINIS

Lessons learned from goalies behaving badly

Josh Ho-Shang and Anthony Stolarz battle for the puck.

Hi gang,

Once again, summer has gone roaring by, filled with goalie camps featuring every kind of goaltender imaginable. I worked with boys and girls, men and women, from tiny 6-year-olds to NHL netminders Cory Schneider and Scott Darling. The sheer spectrum of ages and abilities is what makes coaching so challenging, and so much fun. But, as we often say about goaltending, if it was easy, everyone would do it.

This summer has also had an unmistakable bittersweet mood, as my eldest child, Maddi, prepares to head off to college. Maddi is our volleyball player, and I suspect she's in for a surprise when she gets to the University of New England, and realizes first hand the demands of a collegiate program. That reminded me of this column, which I'm pulling out of the archives. The theme is a simple one: How do you handle adversity?

The examples below illustrate the wrong way to do it, but it's my hope that there are lessons that can be learned from the actions of these two short-sighted netminders. Let me know what you think ...

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Lessons learned from goalies behaving badly

For some goaltenders, the late-season and playoffs can bring out their best performances. For others, that pressure-cooker can be too hot to handle.

Last year at this time, I was writing about a punk netminder from a Minnesota high school who, on Senior Night, intentionally put the puck in his own net, erasing his team's one-goal lead. After giving a middle-finger salute to his bench and coaching staff, he left the ice, and his team wound up losing the game, 3-2. Nice, huh? Fortunately, the school saw fit to suspend this clown, though the damage was already done.

Then, this spring, an OHL playoff game between the Windsor Spitfires and the London Knights featured not one, but two acts of incredibly selfish behavior by goaltenders. The first was Knights' goalie Anthony Stolarz, who took exception to a tap on the pads after tying up the puck and clubbed Spitfire forward Josh Ho-Sang in the back of the head. This was a full-fledged tomahawk chop, with Stolarz holding his stick at the top of the shaft for a maximum arc. Ho-Sang wasn't even looking, having turned away at the whistle (you can see a video clip here).

It was an indefensible act, "temporary insanity" notwithstanding. Stolarz is lucky that Ho-Sang didn't suffer more serious injury, or the former USA national development team member might have seen his major junior career come to a sudden and swift end. And justifiably so. This is not a Billy Smith-style swing at a guy's ankle (not that I'm condoning that course of action either). Stolarz targeted Ho-Sang's cranium (giving a new meaning to his previous junior team, the New Jersey Hitmen).

In this day and age of increased awareness of concussions and head injuries, Stolarz's attack was as cowardly as it was premeditated. It showed total disregard for an opponent, which is a disconcerting trend in the game. I was stunned that the on-ice officials only gave Stolarz a 2-minute minor, which was a ludicrous decision. Fortunately, officials with the Ontario Hockey League saw fit to take far more appropriate action, banning Stolarz for eight games. I hope he takes the time to give some serious thought to his ill-conceived actions.

Another guy who'll have plenty of time to consider the fallout of his actions is Spitfire goaltender Dalen Kuchmey. In the same game, which the Knight's ultimately won, 10-2, Kuchmey pulled himself from Windsor's net with 5:34 left in the second period. He stormed off to the dressing room, changed, and drove off after surrendering eight goals on 26 shots, leaving the Spitfires trailing 8-1.

Not even the great Patrick Roy, when he famously told the Montreal Canadiens that he'd played his last game for Les Habs after the Detroit Red Wings lit him up for nine goals on 26 shots in 32 minutes on Dec. 2, 1995, left the ice on his own. He waited, enduring the shortsighted wrath of the Montreal crowd, until clueless coach Mario Tremblay pulled him from the game. And Roy had two Stanley Cups on his resume by that point.

In the Knights-Spitfires game, there were extenuating circumstances. Kuchmey was Windsor's backup, but got the starting nod because the Spitfires' first-string goalie, Alex Fotinos, was on the bench, sick as a dog. Spitfire coach Bob Bougner told reporters afterward that he had no choice but to leave Kuchmey in the game, given Fotinos' condition. But that, apparently, wasn't Kuchmey's primary concern.

"They embarrassed me in front of my fans, especially in the playoffs," Kuchmeny told the Windsor Star. "(Boughner) could have put Fotinos in to let the bleeding stop. He knows I wasn't having a good game and could have recognized it."

Excuse me? Parents, you really need to read that last graph again. Because if your child has ever complained about a coach's decision, and you allowed it, then you're enabling your child. Excuses are a dime a dozen, and they're for losers. Not only did Kuchmey equate getting torched with Fontinos' illness, but he completely forgot his role.

"A big part of goaltending is situational awareness, everything from knowing how the puck bounces of the boards in a rink to how a team runs their power play," said Stop It goaltending director John Carratu, the goalie coach at Merrimack College. "This goalie knew the situation the team was in. They needed him to fill a specific role, and he didn't want to do it.

"It's like (former Red Sox pitcher) Tim Wakefield in Game 3 of the 2004 series against the Yankees," he said. "He went in to give the pitching staff a chance to rest and regroup. He absorbed a beating from the Yankees, but the staff got the rest it needed. It was the ultimate 'take one for the tea' moment. The Sox came back to win the series, and Wakefield is held in the highest regards amongst Sox fans."

Kuchmey went on to say he was considering quitting the game. My guess is that OHL coaches and general managers have already made that decision for him. Teams, at the major junior level, don't invest in quitters.

Clearly, Kuchmey "was not mature enough to understand the consequences of his actions," said Carratu. "I know hockey is an emotional sport, but part of the game, and life for that matter, is learning to control emotions."

Now, compare Kuchmey's behavior to two outstanding goalies from Hockey East. Lowell's Doug Carr and Boston College's Brian Billett are very good goaltenders in their own right. Carr deservedly got huge props for backstopping the River Hawks to the NCAA tournament in 2012. But last year, he relinquished the starting role, only because of the stellar play of freshman Connor Hellebuyck. Similarly, Billett, a junior, this season lost his starting spot to Eagle freshman Thatcher Demko.

But neither upperclassman complained, or sulked, or quit. Quite the contrary, their coaches repeatedly held them up as shining examples of model teammates, willing to do whatever was necessary to help the team win. That's how it should be.

Unlike Stolarz, Kuchmey in all likelihood ended his career with his premature exit. That's a shame, because he has to have some talent to play at that level. But somewhere along the line, the concept that hockey is a team game was lost on him.

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Guru mailbag

The letter: Hi. Just wanted to say I really enjoyed your article in the Hockey Journal about having a thick skin (NEHJ, February, 2014). I couldn't help but think of it the other day as I watched a goalie have a meltdown because he was being scored on at stick-and- puck skate. I've always believed in showing nothing. Just drink some water, and get back in my stance. I look forward to future articles!

My answer: Thanks for the note. I couldn't agree more. Sports are often a great corollary for life, and how we deal with adversity is important. There are two main lessons. First, like this month's column points out, it's not about you. It's about your team. If a goaltender loses his cool, it engenders doubt among his teammates, and emboldens his opponents. Neither helps his team's chances of winning. Second, you can't allow an opponent's taunting, or a bad goal, to rob you of your love for the game. At the end of the day, hockey is a game, and the object of games is having fun. By getting upset with either trash talk or a bad outing, you cheat yourself of the game's greatest trait.

FINIS

It only hurts when it hurts ...

Avoiding pain is about as primal a human reaction as you could ever hope to find. Masochists aside, there are few people who willingly subject themselves to physical abuse.

Which is why the majority of the general sporting world has always looked somewhat askance at the ice hockey goalie, as if we all have a few screws loose. After all, we willingly put ourselves in front of rock-hard pucks, often fired in excess of 50, 70, even 90 miles an hour. Who in their right mind does that?

But there's more to the position than simply the aches and pains of getting hit by a puck. There are also the psychological "sticks and stones" that can really leave a mark on a young goalie's psyche. It's imperative that, as a parent and/or coach, you keep this in mind. Every other player can make a mistake on the ice, and he or she still has someone covering their back. A safety net, so to speak. That person is the goaltender.

The goaltender, though, doesn't enjoy the same luxury. When a goalie makes a mistake, more often than not, the puck winds up in the back of the net. That's a ton of pressure for a youngster (or anyone, for that matter). Trust me, these kids have feelings. They hear the moans and groans, from teammates, from coaches, from people in the stands. Parents can be particularly callous, not only through their own reactions, but also by what they allow their kids to say.

At the end of the day, it isn't the number of wins and losses that matter in this game. It's the life lessons that can and should be taught. Hockey is a team sport, and one of the most important developmental lessons a coach can impart on his or her team is that "one for all, all for one" approach. There have always been prima donnas in sports, but I'm seeing more and more of them these days. And that's worrisome. Parents, and particularly parents who coach, really have to be vigilant about making sure that one kid isn't held up as a scapegoat for the team's shortcomings.

I take the same approach with referees. When I have a player complaining about the ref, I ask them point blank: "Oh, did you play a perfect game? Refs make mistakes, just like you. You can't make excuses." Likewise, if I hear even so much as a whisper about the goalie's performance, I squash the conversation immediately. Here's why.

On almost every goal scored in hockey, you can find several mistakes that lead to the scoring opportunity. Yes, it's the goalies job to make up for those mistakes, and stop the shots that get through. I don't ever let them forget that. But on almost every single goal, there's usually a series of breakdowns (if you don't believe me, just check out the video reply work by Jeremy Roenick or Eddie Olczyk on Versus during the Stanley Cup playoffs). Goals are often the result of "team" mistakes, not just a goalie mistake. It's critical that coaches remind players that unless those kids played a perfect game themselves (which I have yet to see), then they shouldn't be pointing fingers at anybody else, especially the goaltender.

Now, I understand that goalies give up bad goals. I'm not into coddling. They are responsible for every goal that gets by them. Period. Goalies have to learn to accept that responsibility if they're going to drive themselves to be successful, because the shots only get harder and faster as they move up the ladder. It is not a position for the meek or timid.

That said, goalies also need to know that they have the unwavering support of their team. That's especially true for a kid who works hard at every practice (of course, there will always be kids who hope to get by without putting in any effort, but that's a topic for another column). Parents and coaches have to keep things in perspective, even if teammates might not. If kids are putting in an honest effort, trying hard to improve every time they're on the ice, then they ought to be able to make mistakes without feeling ostracized. And that's the responsibility of the adults.

Several years ago, when I was coaching my daughter's Squirt team, we didn't have a regular goalie. So I made the decision at the beginning of the season that every child would take a turn between the pipes. My reasons were twofold. First, in keeping with my team-oriented approach, I thought it was the only democratic thing to do, since no one wanted to play goal. I'm often amazed to see coaches going back to the same kids simply because those kids had the guts to volunteer in the first place, instead of making sure the responsibility is shared equally.

Second, I wanted each and every one of my players to understand, if only for a single game, the unique pressures that playing goal presents. It was, I'll admit, partly experimental. Whether in hockey, or soccer, or lacrosse, I've always suspected that the kids who were the most reckless about firing shots at the goalies were the same kids who wanted nothing to do with the position. Now, the sample set was pretty small (maybe two dozen games), but suffice to say that I didn't see anything to dissuade me from that premise.

Anyway, with a couple of games left in the season, we had one kid who hadn't played in the nets, and I let him know that his number was up. His mom interceded, and said that "Johnny" was terrified of the prospect. Johnny wasn't scared of getting "hurt," per se. He was mortified of the possibility that he could screw up, and cost his team the game. Because he knew how cruel kids could be about that stuff. I tried to be as diplomatic as possible with Johnny's parents, but I also held firm. The policy was put in at the start of the season, and they never said a word. I couldn't let a parent (or player) off the hook simply because they tried to wait me out. Predictably, Johnny didn't show for the last two games of the season.

That's a shame, because Johnny missed a chance to learn several really important lessons. First, he would have found out, firsthand, that goaltending ain't easy (which I suspect he already knew). Second, win or lose, the sun would still come up the next day. And third, he might have even realized that he was able to face up to his fears and overcome them. Isn't that what sports, in part, is all about. Parents and coaches need to remember that as well.

ESPN columnist and anchor John Buccigross once wrote that the single most important characteristic that a hockey player must develop is confidence. I agree. But confidence needs to be nurtured, cultivated. And that's on the coaches and parents.

Best,
-Brion