In Part 1 we considered how, from one viewpoint, it seems like hockey sense is something that you either have or you don’t and, from another, it appears to be similar to other things in life where it has been proven that people can learn from both teaching and experience.  In this part, we’ll consider why it is that it can appear both ways at the same time.

In my opinion, a key reason for this is that hockey is hugely complex to learn.  When you factor in just the physical skills required to play the game, playing a hockey game is massively overwhelming for anyone who hasn’t practiced extensively.  

If you have been around the game, you do not need me to explain that both skating and puckhandling (including passing and shooting) are extremely detailed and unnatural movements.  At least they are unnatural until they have been practiced extensively.

Hockey sense is a mental skill though.  What do physical skills have to do with hockey sense? Well, we can’t really execute our mental skills if our physical skills aren’t handled automatically. To illustrate this, consider the following question.  How much hockey sense can you have if you have trouble balancing on skates?  

When you don’t have the comfort of feeling balanced your attention instantly goes to flailing your body around to try to regain your balance.  When this happens, it is hard to focus on anything else.  For this reason and for other similar reasons, it is very hard for hockey sense to develop until solid fundamental physical skills are in place.

The complexity of physical skills in the game is only the start of the challenge, however.  Hockey sense is very complicated in and of itself.  Let's understand some of the things that make reading and reacting to the play a challenging skill set in its own right.

First, one can look at the “chess match” of hockey.  This is simply considering how the pieces (players) move around the board (rink).  We usually call this positioning and is, in essence, how you draw up Xs and Os when diagramming a play on a white board.  

When playing hockey, we should also consider the speeds of each player so we can anticipate where they are going to be in the future as well.  Trying to always be in the right position for each situation takes a lot of mental effort and skill.

When great hockey players are in the right place, they also demonstrate proper body position. Typically this means offering non-verbal communication to a teammate about where to put a pass on offense, limiting opponent options on defense, or being ready to react quickly to an unpredictable situation such as a potential rebound from a shot.  

This includes foot positioning, stick positioning, angling, and more and is all based on rules that apply in some situations and not in others.

In addition to processing what is going on on the ice, we should also read body language to try to determine what others are going to do.  This is no big deal, right?  We just need to try to get a feel for what a few players on the other team intend to do and we are set.

Wrong.  This can apply to every player on the ice.  If you can predict what your teammate will do, you will offer far better “support” for their play.  If you can predict what the other team’s players want to do, you can take away that preferred plan and force them to improvise to secondary options.

Finally, players should verbally communicate with teammates (and use the other team’s communication against them).  This means processing what they are saying.  It also means trying to say what you want to in as few words as possible to make it easy for your teammates to process.

The point of all this is just to point out how much our brains have to do while playing hockey.  It is an enormous amount of information processing and, when playing against players at or above our level, the game progresses faster than we can actually process all of it.

As much of it as possible must be made automatic and that takes a lot of hours of “practice.” I put practice in quotes here because we will discuss what sorts of practice are good for this in an upcoming article… but it definitely does not mean highly structured practice we usually think of when thinking about practice.

It is this huge load of information processing combined with the near infinite possible scenarios that the game presents which makes hockey sense so hard to teach.  How many hours would it take to teach all of those processing demands for every scenario that a team can expect to encounter?  I

t would be far more than the number of hours a coach has at his or her disposal for a season, that is for sure.  So the best way for kids to learn is for the coach to give the players many opportunities to read and react and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Yet this is the opposite of most of our coaching/teaching instincts where we value structure and control.  

In my opinion, this is why it seems like hockey sense is something we either have or don’t.

Coaches who try hardest to impose our will on practice design to try to teach hockey sense are doing things the exact wrong way if their goal is to develop hockey sense.  Instead, we need to spend more time getting out of the way and letting hockey sense learning happen.

In Part 3, we’ll outline a few well-vetted ideas on how coaches have helped players develop hockey sense over the years.

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