As a skills instructor, I am constantly presented with parents’ pain points about their player’s skill set.  They seem to think, “If they could just do [insert skill area here] better, they would be able to [insert goal for next season here].”  Note that the most common example of the skill area that needs work is speed.  This is a perfectly reasonable way to think.  In fact, many parents who work in a corporate setting are trained to think this way.

If you are familiar with developments in the realm of the ideas surrounding business management in the last 50 or so years, you may be familiar with the idea of Toyota’s lean production.  The idea amounts to a method to work toward producing a product (in the Toyota example, this would be an automobile) as rapidly and inexpensively as possible.

There are two keys to lean production.  First is that any part that is needed and will be combined with others at a certain stage on an assembly line should arrive exactly when it is needed, not before and not after.  This idea is not helpful with respect to today’s discussion around Hockey development.  The other idea is to push the production line, including every person and machine, to the maximum and figure out what becomes the limiting factor, which prevents the production line from going still faster.  They then fix that factor so they can push it faster still and find the new limiting factor.  In this way they push the system ever faster until they reach a point of diminishing returns with this process.

Many parents use this same concept with their skaters.  Many, who are business managers themselves, crave to see their skaters work within this same continuous improvement paradigm and attempt to use essentially the same process to get it.

So, how do these parents go about mimicking the lean production process within their player’s development.  In order to imitate “pushing the assembly line to the maximum”, young players can play games against players as good or better than themselves.  We would all agree this is a good thing for a player to do.  The next step is to then evaluate the player’s performance for what is holding them back from thriving within that level of play.

This is where the problem begins.  In my time as a skill development instructor I have seen countless parents who get almost obsessively hung up on whatever limitation they identify.  They look to aggressively address that specific issue seeking and trying many different attempts at a quick fix.  The problem is two fold.  First, Hockey skill is a broad set of abilities that must come together to allow a player to perform at or ahead of the pace of the game.  Second, it should not be about how good you are now; it should be about how good you can be at the end of your development process.

When you put those two ideas together, the quick fix of one area of weakness in a youth player’s game becomes a bad idea.  This is not to say that we should not work on our weakness, but at all stages of development we should keep in mind that general work on all aspects of our game should be the primary focus with secondary foci on weaknesses.

But there is an even bigger problem.  This comes from the fact that one of the major motivators for many players is parental approval.  But, the lean production / continuous improvement idea is one that seeks an ever more challenging measurement to assess ability (more challenging games for the youth player to play in so the next limiting factor can be identified).  The result is that the parent is NEVER satisfied.  On the other hand, the healthiest approach for the youth player is for parents to ALWAYS be satisfied as long as the player is “working hard”.  That view actually fosters increased motivation for the player as they receive their desired reward from parents for the direct product of that motivation, namely hard work.

To wrap this up, while some extra focus on an area of weakness can be a good prescription, a temporary laser focus on that area at the expense of general development is a mistake.  Also, the cycle of parents always seeking that next limiting factor, fixing it, and then seeking a new, more challenging measurement to identify the next limiting factor is unhealthy for a young player’s emotional development and, eventually, their motivation to be their best at Hockey.