The Secret to Coaching Youth Hockey Players

Coaching youth hockey is no easy feat. Whether you’re a parent or a professional coach, however, you can learn a lot about how to best coach your young athlete by understanding what kind of coaching and teaching works best with children. 

Research has proven time and time again that positive feedback is what gets the best results when it comes to young people. In fact, a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that, for younger athletes, specifically those between the ages of 8 and 9, negative feedback is very ineffective, and the younger a player is, the less effective it is.

What that means is that when you say things like, “Great job!” after a player does something well, the player learns. He learns that what he has just done is good, worthy of praise, and should be repeated.When you say something like, “That wasn’t right,” or even, “Do better next time,” those same “alarm bells” don’t sound in the young player’s mind. The athlete might feel bad...but it rarely leads to actually learning anything or making a connection about what to do better the next time. In that way, negative feedback is just a bad thing to do all around and garners no results except for making the athlete feel bad and harming his confidence.

Instead of giving negative feedback, coaches are instructed, when they see behavior they don’t want repeated, to ask analytical, straightforward questions like, “How can you play better next time?” or “What do you think you could improve on for your next game?” This will get kids thinking about what they did wrong and how to do better...the response you’re trying to get (but definitely don’t get!) when you say something negative.And, even better yet, these types of statements don’t cause harm to the athlete or reduce his self confidence.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s okay and even helpful for young athletes to make mistakes. When they make these mistakes, sometimes it’s best not to say anything...even something constructive and helpful. Instead, it’s better to sit back and watch the player learn from his actions on his own. For small mistakes, coaches  should try this technique at least one or two times. If, by then, the player isn’t self-correcting, which in and of itself is an important skill to learn, THEN they can step in with the constructive comments, but it’s still good to give players a chance to learn and improve on their own. In fact, that’s one of the more useful “self skills” that youth hockey teaches.

So, no matter how hard it may be, bite your tongue when you want to say something negative to a young player. Science shows that it’s not going to work, period, and that even your most helpful comments are only useful some of the time.

Marc Trestman Speaks on Coaching

Coaching is an important job. It is one that demands absolute dedication to one’s players and a willingness and desire to help those players to succeed. No matter what sport a person coaches, the end goal is the same: to help mold young players into the best athletes they can be and to give them all the tools they need to succeed, both in the sport and in life itself. That’s why the recent words of Marc Trestman, given in an interview to the PCA National Advisory, ring true for coaches of all sports, including those who coach youth hockey.   

Trestman, who is the author of Perseverance: Life Lessons on Leadership and Teamwork and who has almost three decades of coaching experience under his belt, spoke to the honor and difficulty of being a coach in the interview. He asserted that coaches have a hard job but one of the most important ones there is. He also said that, as such, all coaches, regardless of level or sport, should really devote time and effort to considering what they are doing as coaches and why they’re doing it. Obviously, the answer should be to better and enable their players, and if that’s not the purpose and drive behind it, then they need to get that in check.

Of course, like all coaches, Trestman wants his players to win, but he stresses, in this profound interview, that winning doesn’t happen because of coaching. He also says that, furthermore, producing a winning team shouldn’t be the goal of coaching. He believes that, instead, coaching should be about instilling the right behaviors, goals, and attitudes in players, and that when a coach does those things, it will naturally lead to winning. He wants his players not just to be good athletes, but to be good people, and that- creating good people- is really what is at the heart of coaching.