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Hockey Sense: Can it be taught?

By Andy Blaylock, 08/24/16, 8:45AM CDT

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Part 1 on learning the game

There are things in sports where players are said to either have them or not.  In other words, these are things you can’t teach and are simply dependent on genes.  In this view, the player is either lucky enough to have good genes for the type of skill in question or they do not and no amount of practice will change that.

There is no doubt that just about everything in sports skill development is affected by genetic variation of athletes.  This is to say that, for whatever sports skill you are considering, a person’s ultimate potential and how fast they improve toward that potential are both questions that are deeply affected by genetics.  But, when working on your game, are there things that you can’t do anything about?  Are there things that you can’t change no matter how hard you work?

In hockey, one area that is often cited as a skill set that a player either has or they don’t is hockey sense.  One could say, “of course you either have it or you don’t, that is true of all of the skills.”  True.  But what is really meant by this is that it isn’t worth trying to change it.  They are saying it isn’t like developing a quick and accurate snapshot or an efficient skating stride.  They are saying that some people just process the game better than others and the difference is not a matter of practice, but instead is one of genetics.

Is this true?  As a hockey coach and skills instructor, I tend to believe that there is nothing that cannot be improved by focusing on it, attempting to do it well, analyzing how it went, and then trying again.  I must admit, a counter example to my view is the area a player’s potential itself.  If you define your potential as how good you could be if you did every aspect of hockey development perfectly, then that “potential” would not change based on what you actually did for development.  Yet, this is sort of irrelevant because there is no such thing as perfect development in real life.

With that said, reading and reacting to the game (which is what our hockey sense does) is a great example of an action that we can perform with our minds, implement on the ice, analyze how well we did, and adjust to try again.  No doubt, doing a lot of this should lead to improvement.  Our brains learn by doing just that all the time in every area of our life.

Why then do people find it hard to see how hockey sense can be taught?

In Part 2, we will discuss how the classic model of teaching and hockey coaching can fall short when teaching hockey sense and how the best ways to teach it often fight against a coach’s natural instinct to use structure and control when designing training sequences (A.K.A. practices).

One of Minnesota's premier hockey trainers, Andy Blaylock joins the YHH Staff to write about the dynamics of training, both on ice and off.  Andy is the General Manager of Competitive Edge Hockey in St. Louis Park. His content will emphasize the importance of high quality in-season and off-season training. In addition to running his own private clinics and camps, Andy has trained several organizations including Andover, Anoka, Edina, Hutchinson, STMA and Wayzata.

Andy can be reached via email at Andy@compedgehky.com 

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