Early Specialization in Sport

When is it too early to specialize?  Check this video out from Nova Scotia.  It was produced out of a partnership including soccer and hockey.

Nova Scotia leads the way...

High School Sport - what's it all about?

Back in Blighty, high school sport was just a chance to play with your mates and have a bit of a laugh.  Sure, we'd practice once or twice a week, but that was really just scrimmaging anyway.  We'd win some, we'd lose some, nobody really cared. What I remember most was some of the quirky teacher-coaches we had over the years, the occasional near dust up and that time it hailed so hard we all ran and hid in the hedge.

Fast forward and move to Canada and I start to see pictures and reports in the newspaper - people seem to be taking it quite seriously, especially basketball and hockey.  I've tried to understand high school sports, but I find it an enigma, wrapped in a puzzle.  Is it about developing the individual through sport?  Is it about developing athletes?  Is it about winning the provincial banner?  Does it mean different things to different people?  I don't know!

This past weekend was the play-downs for the high school provincial basketball championships and following one of the games there was a bit of a spat between a couple of coaches.  It boiled down to the fact that one school had two players who were not locals, but had allegedly moved to that school's catchment area to play basketball in what is considered to be a 'top program'.  The two players had a major impact on the result and the losing coach was griping and implying it was not fair as at his school, they developed their own players.

I don't know if there are written or unwritten rules about this sort of thing, but in most sports outside of the school system this would be perfectly acceptable and even encouraged.  Soccer NB has a development centre located in Moncton with a full-time professional coach and support services designed to help the top high school aged players progress.  They encourage provincial team players to relocate.  It operates outside of school sport.  If you are a promising and passionate figure skater, but happen to live in Backwoods, NB. where the local club has only 2 hours of ice time a week and Ginny's Mom does the coaching duties, you are not going to achieve your goals unless you relocate. Basketball NB has excellent provincial team programs that run in the summer, but high school basketball is the only game in town for the long winter months.

Put yourself in shoes of a talented and passionate basketball player who happens to go to a school with a weak basketball program, or no team at all.  Do they let their dreams (and potential scholarship opportunities) fade away or do they relocate to a school that provides excellent coaching and a strong competitive schedule?  And, if there's a school rule against that sort of thing, should high schools be the primary development vehicle for the sport?

Comments please.

It's (not) all about the games

Watching sports on tv this weekend, as I generally do, twice I heard professional coaches lamenting about how little time they had to practice.  Mike Babcock of the Maple Leafs and Jose Mourinho of Manchester United have both been stymied in their efforts to improve team performance by a congested game schedule.

A speaker at the Sport for Life Conference once stated that many basketball parents rate a program by a) the amount of 'stuff' their child gets and b) the number of games they play.

The Canadian Sport for Life model establishes an ideal practice to game ratio for all ages / stages of development.  For those in the Learn to Train (9-12 yrs) and Train to Train (12-16 yrs) it is generally 3  or 2 practices for every game played.  How many sport teams observe this ratio?

Think about it this way, the game is a test to see what you know and what you don't know (rather like at school). After the test, you know what you need to work on.  If you don't practice, however, how are you going to get better?  www.canadiansportforlife.ca   

Building the Athlete First

The one thing that most great players have in common is that they are also great athletes.  A look back into their childhood reveals a youth spent outdoors, playing with friends and trying a wide variety of sports.  These days, I hear from a lot of New Brunswick coaches that they don’t see a lot of natural athletes any more.

Today’s youth are much less likely to spend their time outdoors playing and exploring and much more likely to spend their time indoors playing computer games or watching NetFlix.  The result is that children showing up in youth sport programs often lack the basic skills needed to be successful.  Fundamental skills such as running, jumping, throwing, catching and sliding are underdeveloped.  This means that we must change the way we coach.

Teaching basic movement and general sport skills is now an essential component of early sport programming.  There’s little point in practicing break out drills if players can’t move, pass or control an object efficiently.

A growing number of sports have now embedded the development of fundamental skills into their developmental programs.  For example, Skate Canada has its CanSkate program, Baseball has its Rally Cap and Athletics has its Run Jump Throw.  All of these programs have a focus on developing movement and basic sport skills using fun activities and small sided games.  Coaches of other sports need to creatively including the development of fundamental skills into their practices.  The days where the warm-up consisted of 10 laps of the gym have disappeared from the progressive coach’s practice plan.   

In addition to developing better athletes for your sport, who will become better players in the future, the development of all-round fundamental skills is a win for the individual and society.  Physically literate individuals are more confident and more likely to be active throughout their lifetime.  Further, they will reap many benefits in their everyday lives from having better balance on icy sidewalks to improved dance moves on a Saturday night. 

Rant #1 - Competitive C Hockey

I had a conversation with a parent last week and it was one of those that raises the blood pressure significantly.  Her son is 9 years old and was playing with a Competitive C Atom team.  “What the heck is Competitive C”, you might rightly ask, and let’s be honest, it’s rec hockey.

Now I said in the introduction that he was playing, but now he isn’t because he has quit.  So, is he a quitter, has he let his team down?  Heck no, he’s a 9 year old that just wants to play hockey.  He’s a typical kid, except he’s not as good as some of the other boys so his coach decided that 2 minutes at the end of each period was ample playing time – less if the result of the game hung in the balance.  In fact, it is so important that the team be successful that the coach double shifts all the best players and confines the rest to the end of the bench.

This is 9 year old recreational hockey.  It exists to help kids have fun, learn new skills make new friends and be physically active.  That is its primary focus and the job of the coach is to help everyone of the kids on their team achieve these goals.  Now, I’m not saying that the kids should all hold hands, go easy on the opposition and try to end all matches in a tie – if keeping score at all.  No, I play to win and would expect all players to do the same, but it is not the result that is important at the end of the day.  Nobody cares or remembers who beat who on any given January day in a Competitive C New Brunswick hockey match-up.

For Pete’s sake, let all the kids play and use your coaching skills to balance your team as best you can to be competitive against your opposition.  The coach’s excuse to the parent in this case, was that the team needed to do well in the league to get a preferential draw in the play-offs.  Not good enough!  All the benefits of participation in sport, all the lessons to be learned around teamwork, hard work and commitment are all lost when a team is no longer a team, it's two teams – those with skill and those with less skill.  What makes this particular situation worse is that the weaker players were largely excluded in practice as well – sent to skate from pylon to pylon while the more able players did puck handling drills.

We’ve got to do better than that.