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| Find something else to do this summer besides hockey! |
Just last night, I was watching a great special on youth sports, and it was driving home the point of how important it is to be a multi-sport athlete. The show featured a number of athletes from a variety of sports, including the NHL's Johnny Gaudreau and Nate McKinnon. And all of them had essentially the same message: Playing many sports makes you a better athlete.
So stop listening to all those money-grabbing "elite" sports programs who insist that you'll "fall behind" if you're not playing hockey 24/7, year round. It's a marketing ploy, plain and simple. Here's my Goalie Guru column on the topic. Let me know what you think! And don't forget to get outside!
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Variety is the spice of the off-season for hockey players
When my editor suggested a training-related column for our annual training issue, I immediately thought of the myriad workout programs that have been developed in the past dozen years that are designed to make you the best goaltender your God-given talents will allow. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like going in a different direction. After all, it's the June issue. And June, unless you're playing in the Stanley Cup finals, is not exactly hockey season.
Now, to be completely up front, I'm not opposed to playing year round. There's an old adage in sports that "champions are made in the off-season." There's a great deal of truth to that saying, provided people don't lose proper perspective. It's important to note, the adage doesn't say anything about playing the same sport 52 weeks a year.
Proponents of sports specialization have taken advantage of that adage, twisting its message to imply that a full-year commitment ought to be a requirement for the serious athlete. In doing so, they've duped thousands of parents who feel like they're doing their little hockey player a disservice if they don't provide year-round instruction and training.
(Full disclosure: I, as a coach with a goalie instruction outfit, recognize that I can potentially be seen as "part of the problem." But at Stop It Goaltending, we actively encourage kids to pursue different activities to complement their goalie training. That's a big difference, to my way of thinking.)
This has been a hot topic lately. Houston Texan defensive end J.J. Watt, an all-world talent, recently took to Twitter to voice his concerns about playing a single sport full-time. Watt, who grew up playing hockey (Can you imagine what a power forward that guy would be?!), was remarkably candid in his criticism of specialization. In a Tweet from early March, Watt wrote: "If someone encourages your child to specialize in a single sport, that person generally does not have your child's best interests in mind."
I agree. I also believe there's far more to Watt's simple statement than appears on the surface. There is an entire youth sports industry – and it continues to grow – that is banking on parents believing that the only way their child will reach the pinnacle of their sport is to have little Jane or Johnny play that sport over and over and over again.
Those parents ought to consider this telling statistic: Of all the athletes selected in the 2016 NFL Draft, nearly 90 percent of them were multi-sport athletes in high school, according to TrackingFootball.com, a website that compiles multi-sport participation data on high school and college football players. Watt played four different sports in high school. Arizona Cardinals All-Pro defensive end Calais Campbell told the web-based training site STACK why playing numerous sports helped him become a better football player.
"Playing multiple sports 100 percent made me a better athlete," Campbell said. "When you play different sports, you're forced to do different things. I learned quick-twitch stuff from basketball. Track and field, I learned about my stride, my jumping, my hip thrust. I actually even wrestled for a while, and that helped me learn leverage and momentum. It all transfers over and develops different muscle groups."
My guess is that Campbell also enjoyed switching things up. When I was in high school, I loved the dissimilarities between being a soccer midfielder, where I ran all day between my attacking and defensive responsibilities, being a hockey goaltender, where I was far more confined but had a very important role, and being a third baseman for the baseball team, which I found was the ideal blend of cerebral and physical challenges.
Only in hindsight did I really stop to think how each sport benefited the others. For me, the variety is what I enjoyed most.
I've lost count of the number of parents I've talked to who would bemoan that their sons and daughters weren't all that motivated to play during the summer. These are the same parents who have their kids attending skating clinics (on and off ice), shooting clinics, and stickhandling clinics almost non-stop. I haven't found a polite way to say: "Can't you hear yourself? No wonder your kid wants a break."
Except for the very rare instance, kids crave diversity. Can you imagine a math whiz going to school and taking nothing but algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, etcetera? Really? Of course not. We want our children to be well rounded academically. Well, the same holds true for athletic pursuits. Variety is a good thing, not only from the perspective of development, but also to prevent overuse injuries.
The reality is that sports specialization is nothing new. I remember writing about it as a cub reporter in the spring of 1983. Yup, 34 years ago. Things have only gotten worse since then, and it's all driven by one factor: The Almighty Dollar. There is a ton of money to be made in the sports development landscape.
Those folks aren't going to make much money by telling their kids to "just go ride your mountain bike." But I'm telling you, that's exactly what you, as a parent, ought to do. Let the kids play.
Here's my chief concern. Advances in goalie training have created an entire generation of robotic goaltenders. They're strong and quick and technically proficient, but they're not necessarily better athletes. I compare them to a mountain biker on a familiar slice of technical singletrack trail. When that mountain biker knows every twist, turn, and obstacle on the trail, he can anticipate what's coming and rip a pretty clean line. But put the same cyclist on a trail he's never seen before, and he'll be more tentative, more cautious, slower.
A hockey game is much more like that unknown ribbon of technical singletrack. Out of necessity, many of the drills we develop and employ during goalie clinics and camps mirror the well-known trail. We want to build muscle memory. But coaches also need to recognize when goalies start performing "to the drill," instead of simply reacting. That's why, at Stop It, we always try to end each session with "game time."
The beauty of game time is that it's organic, and unpredictable. Our games are design to make the goalies employ what they've just learned, but also to improvise. That's when you find out who your competitors are. It's also when you discover who the better athletes are.
Over time, I believe kids gradually discover the benefits of being a multi-sport athlete (though they may not understand it in the moment). Their movements become more fluid, more natural. In a very subtle sense, they become more confident, which allows them to be more patient, and let the game come to them.
So get out of the rink. Expand your horizons, and enjoy other sports. Ride your bike, surf, play tennis, soccer, lacrosse, basketball, volleyball, baseball. Anything other than hockey. Have fun. Laugh. You'll be a better goaltender.
FINIS
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