Until
recently, youth hockey was considered a sport only for the “serious athlete,”
meaning the young athlete with aspirations of one day becoming a professional
hockey player. As such, the typical youth hockey player was one whose parents
were very serious about the sport, whose parents started him or her playing at
a young age, and who spent a lot of time and money on hockey. Behaving this way
was deemed as a sort of “pathway to success” for the aspiring pro hockey
player.
Shirt badge/Association crest (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Lately,
however, the USA Hockey organization has stopped encouraging these attitudes
and beliefs. It banned body-checking at the pee wee level to encourage
otherwise nervous parents and kids to play the game. It also put an end to its
expensive peewee national championship to encourage those families who weren’t
willing or able to invest a lot of money in hockey to participate. It also,
perhaps most shockingly of all, has encouraged its young players to engage in
at least one other sport.
While,
to many, these changes seem counterproductive, USA Hockey has its reasons for
implementing them. Studies conducted by the organization divulged that by the
age of 9, 43% of children who had been introduced to the sport at a young age
had quit playing altogether. Delving further into this issue, they blamed the
high quit-rates on children who were being pressured into the sport,
overworked, and simply not having fun playing it. So, the goal of these changes
is actually to increase the number of children playing hockey and, thus, to
create more future pro hockey players, naturally. The thought is that if children are able
to enjoy and play other sports and to focus less on the competitive aspects of
the game, they will learn more in terms of actual skills and techniques and
enjoy their playing and practice time more.
In fact, these principles are believed in so strongly that the
organization took them one step further and implemented a plan known as the
American Development Model or ADM for short. This program is focused more on
having fun and learning the fundamentals of the game than it is on competition
or excessive practice.
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