Confidence is huge in hockey. Regardless of skill level, age, or experience; players with confidence not only perform up to their potential, but they have more fun. As a coach, it’s important to identify which of your players have high levels of confidence and which need your help to develop it.
Here’s one technique that I use to identify my high confidence players from my low confidence players. I’d like to say that I developed this through careful study and systematic research but in reality, I just stumbled across it during one of my practices.
The Confidence Test
So here’s how I “discovered” my confidence test. One of my goalies called in sick right before practice leaving us with only one goalie, no time to bring in another one and a practice plan designed with two goalies in mind. Not a big deal. It happens all the time.
As a coach – it’s not ideal, and as a player – shooting on an empty net just isn’t near as fun, but it’s still an opportunity to work on your shot.
We were running a warm-up shooting drill and at one end there was no goalie (obviously). I encourage my players to always visualize themselves in game situations for every drill we do so they should be shooting like they would in a real game.
In the end with the goalie, the players were working hard to take a quick wrist shot from the high slot. Perfect.
At the other end, it was a gong show. Players were teeing up slap shots from outside the blue line. No one was hitting the net. It was pretty much as far from “game situation” as you could get.
I stopped the drill and reviewed with the players that we’re trying to replicate game situations. We want to be taking quick wrist shots from the high slot; not clappers from centre. Even when there’s no goalie, we should be shooting for “the post and in” with a shot we’d actually use in a game.
Now to ramp up the drill a bit more and to “encourage” the players to hit the net, I added that if you miss the net you get to do ten push-ups.
That simple instruction had such a profound effect on the players. As soon as we fired up the drill again, it was obvious that the players had made a decision either to “shoot to score” and pay the price if they missed or to “shoot to not miss” and never have to do push ups and of course, never score.
The interesting thing was that the players that I could count on in the clutch; those that I would want to have out when we needed to protect a one goal lead; they all shot to score. The players that didn’t do well in pressure situations all chose to shoot not to miss. From these observations my confidence test was born.
Taking Action
It was pretty clear that one group had the confidence in their skill that they would push themselves to their limits while the other group was afraid to make a mistake. The low confidence group purposefully chose not to even try to score just so they wouldn’t fail.
For the low confidence group, it’s important to start building their confidence immediately. Providing opportunities for every player to succeed is key. And so is properly attributing both successes and failures (I’ll talk about this in a future post).
When I Use the “Test”
I try to run a drill or two that features my confidence test at the end of team tryouts. This gives me a baseline for my players and can help me make a few of those tough decisions on whether to sign a player or not.
I’ll also run the confidence test a couple more times through out the season. If I’m doing my job properly I should see more and more players choosing to shoot to score and this is one of the ways I evaluate my success as a coach.
Yours in hockey;
John
