To successfully manage a hockey team, two aspects of coaching the game, operations, and administration, must be taken seriously. Operation aspects of coaching the game include the skills, knowledge, and concepts that are required to play the game. Apart from the need to pass the necessary knowledge, skills, and concepts to the young players, coaching young players also entails a lot of administrative functions. As a coach one deals with different people or stakeholders ranging from the school’s administration to corporate executives and promoters, parents and even funs. Also working with these young boys and girls, one has to do a lot of paperwork relating to things such as registration of players, insurance against liability, setting budgets, creating agendas, filling up the ‘to do list’ session after session. All these are necessary to ensure that the game is safe and fun for the children.
Coaching children who are at the age of 8 and below requires to focus on teaching the appropriate concepts and skills. Despite focusing on the main goal of children’s’ development as players, the coaching exercise should be designed in a way that will leave the children with enjoyable hockey experience. One major point of focus while training children of this age is fun. Coaches handling children of this age should never underestimate the value of fun. The main reason for this is the fact that if the sport is not consistently sold out to the children as fun at this age, the newness of the sport might wear off diminishing their enthusiasm to learn the game and eventually may quit the sport altogether. At this age, it is paramount for the young players have fun every time they step onto the pitch.
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The other concept required to coach young hockey players is that of fostering a motivational climate for the children. Creation of such an environment is dependent on the coach’s organization of sessions, interpersonal interactions plus their coaching philosophy. Of course crucial to this concept is how the children will perceive and interpret the coach’s action which in turn will impact their choice of action. This is to say that much emphasis should be placed on how a coach engages his or her team. Proper engagement goes hand in hand with fun and it involves targeting the optimal skill level of each and every player. By designing small game one can be able to learn a lot about the capabilities of their teams. Here, these young players will not have to say or provide any feedback instead the games themselves will provide the young players with the chance to effectively display targeted skills and concepts. By creating such a constructive motivational climate and a cultural environment which values the children’s development, children stand to be impacted positively in their growth and development of the game. While at it, it is important to consider how a coach expresses success and how the coach frames the information provided by the result.
A positive approach to coaching effectiveness and performance enhancement assignment is another concept crucial to coaching the young children. This entails how a coach makes his team feel about various aspects of the game. As a coach for young children, harsh criticism plants negative seeds in young children and may curtail the development of children. This concept requires that a coach be making positive compliments and give positive criticism whenever necessary. If properly used, this concept has the capacity get every player grow beyond their capabilities as effective coaching will enable the children to feel great about themselves, make them know that their coach trusts them and have total confidence in their abilities. As such the young children will subscribe to the fact that though they have weaknesses, their strength sure outdo them. All these are as a result of positive reinforcement and ensuring that none of the young boys and girls think negatively at any given time.
Motor skill learning for effective coaching and performance or knowing the right kind of active practices for these young children is another important quality in coaching. At this young age, the children’s practice should entail more of the high amount of activity with a low amount of rest. These young players should not spend a lot of time waiting to practice standing in line to do drills or play. As such, this concept requires that coaches, design practices that are active for a better part of the training. Also, goals set during practice should correspond to the amount of activity each player is expected to achieve in practice. The activity level of the children is quite important in the long-term development of the young children. Also, it should be remembered that children at this age will learn more by doing and not by watching or listening.
Understanding and managing stress, especially for these young children, is another skill crucial to coaching. Here these players are taught the difference between fun and nervousness. Man is to error and the same should be conveyed to the children that making mistakes is common in sports. Given this, the young players are allowed to make mistakes in practice and game settings. Also, the young children should not be made to feel uncomfortable if they try to showcase their creativity in performing a hockey move or skill and failed. In fact, the most important aspect of this concept is to create an environment where players are willing to try again after failing. Such an environment will help one to positively manage stress for the children.
As shown above, the operative aspects helps one to pass the necessary knowledge and skills to players in accordance to the game’s needs and rules. However, to make the game really fun, the administrative aspects of coaching must be spot on. Good administration of a team sport and for our case hockey revolves around how one handles multi-level relationships, how one communicates effectively and other matters such as fundraisers and budgeting. In fact, good administration and strong management of the game can really help improve the game not only for the players and their coaches but also their parents and other stakeholders as well. Three main aspects of hockey administration that I find crucial include insurance, costs, and registration.
One day during one of our training session one boy really injured a teammate by the hockey stick. By the look of it was an accident but there was a child with a severe head injury that the school’s sanatorium could not handle. This had become a liability issue and someone had to be responsible for taking care of the injured child. Lucky for the school and me as the coach, in particular, all the necessary paper regarding insurance of the players had been dealt with. In the US, there is an insurance policy in place by Hockey US which helps to cover severe injuries and liability. Ensuring that all your players are insured is a crucial administrative responsibility for the coach. Indeed, this is one sure way of making the game fun and safe.
The other important administrative aspect of coaching is that of registration. Whenever parents enroll their hockey to have fun, most often than not, these parents usually expect their children to play with their age mates where they can play freely and enjoy themselves. If different age groups were to play together or the players were to lack uniformity i.e. some players being well equipped than others, then the game would not be fair and to say the least fun. As such, through registration, the administration help to keep all age groups together and that everyone complies.
Budgeting and how to manage costs is also an important administration aspect when it comes to coaching hockey. Hockey is a game which is usually played in areas managed by communities or private investors and those who want to use these spaces must pay for them. Knowing how to manage and administer hockey registration fees, fundraiser fees and how to schedule timeslots for games in the league is a very important administrative function. This function greatly improves the organization of the team and the effectiveness of management of same.
