Volume 2

This month's tip of the month is for players, coaches and parents. Playing to win sometimes becomes so much of our focus that we lose sight of why kids play the game in the first place. So this tip is for players who think that because they are the best player on the team they should play more, coaches who think the same thing about some of their players, and parents of the better kids who think the poorer players should play what we might euphemistically call "a supportive role" and deserve to sit the bench in tight games or during every power play. It comes in the form of an answer to a question from the parent of a Mite travel player who is enrolled in the IT PAYS program, but it applies to any player, any coach, and any team.

Dear Dan: My son is a member of a travel hockey team that is currently participating in the IT PAYS program. Because we are a travel hockey team, equal ice time was never expected for our players during games. Your program states however, that every player should be given the opportunity to participate equally. If travel hockey does not require equal ice time and your program does, how can a travel hockey team participate in your program? Concerned Parent

Thanks for your question about IT PAYS, particularly one about which there is the most misunderstanding - the dreaded "equal ice time" question. I think this is a question for all programs to address, not just those in IT PAYS.

First, IT PAYS doesn't insist on equal ice time. It insists that each player have an equal opportunity to participate in all aspects of the game. That difference may be the only answer to your question that's necessary. IT PAYS isn't suggesting you put a stopwatch on each player. If a line plays on the power play in close games, another line should play the power play on games that are in hand or out of reach. But allow me a bit of an explanation as to why we think this is an important part of the IT PAYS initiative.

There are two parts to the philosophy behind this tenant: the first has to do with fairness. If my son pays the same fees as everyone else, he shouldn't get to play more than anyone else neither because he's my son nor because he's better than any of the other kids. The flip side of that is - it's not fair if my son gets more ice time because he's better which will result in depriving another child - who is not as skilled - of equal opportunities to learn the game. It's also not fair if my brother's kid plays on the power play to the exclusion of your better son because of the pressure I get from my brother's wife.

The other part of the philosophy has to do with why we have our children participate in youth sports. I argue the only reasons are to have fun, improve their athleticism, and learn life lessons. I think your son (even though he may not be as good as mine), should have the opportunity to have as much fun, develop as much athleticism, and learn positive life lessons as my "future NHL'er". The talented or more experienced player shouldn't have a monopoly or even an edge on any of the wholesome reasons we have our children participate in youth sports. I don't think kids who always sit the third period in tight games are having fun, improving their athleticism, and I'm not sure about the life lessons they're learning at age seven.

Further, kids don't play youth sports to win. They play to compete. If you doubt that, I challenge you to remember the score of any game in any sport you participated in prior to high school or even if you won the game or lost. If you're like most folks, you can't remember. Perhaps that makes the point that winning must not be that important to the kids. I know it's important to the parents and coaches and I assume we're in this endeavor for the kids.

If none of these arguments carry any ice with you, perhaps the ones that follow will. Teams don't win with their good players; they lose with their bad players - just as in the NHL where goals are almost always scored as the result of the other team's mistakes. I am aware the conventional wisdom concludes that therefore you should only play your good players. But (assuming you have a good line, and average line, and a poor line) if you play your good line a lot, they will only improve marginally. But if you play your poor line as much, they will benefit from the additional ice time and improve more than marginally and you will wind up with a good line and two average lines.

This is a lesson my father taught me. He didn't know a lick about hockey but he was an obliging guy so the league often saddled his teams with the league's "losers." But he always had winning teams and it was, at least in part, because he played everyone fairly. (To my dismay at the time, he almost always put the worst kid on the team on my line - but you can read about that in our second book in a chapter entitled, "Do I have to play with that kid on my line?"). His second line started the second period and his third line started the third. If we had a power play and it was the third line's turn to go out, they went out. And realizing the faith he put in them, and that they wouldn't get benched if they made a mistake, they played their hearts out for him. At the end of the season - they were up there with the second line in ability and we rarely lost "because of our poor players." Did he play everyone equally every game? No, he would tell us the first 55 minutes of the game were ours to win or lose, the last five were his to coach to win. If the game was in jeopardy, he would shorten the bench in the last five minutes. If the game was in hand, he also shortened the bench - the best players didn't play.

Another thing happened. Parents who were genuinely concerned about the atmosphere their children played in and who had a wholesome attitude about the meaning and purpose of youth sports sought to have their kids play for my father - and as a result, I can't remember our teams ever having "parent problems."

Here's a financial reason to give everyone equal opportunity: kids of lesser ability, who get an equal opportunity to participate, stay in the game longer instead of dropping out because of getting short shifted. More kids in the program means more money in the treasury - that is, IT PAYS financially for your program.

Another reason why you should give every kid an equal chance is none of us are smart enough to know which kid is going to be the one that will blossom. I'm told when Brendan Shanahan was a PeeWee, his coach rarely let him hit the ice and when he did, the other kids' parents would groan, "Don't play that kid!" Fortunately for Brendan and the Detroit Red Wings, subsequent coaches had a different philosophy.

And here's concrete evidence that it works: the province of Nova Scotia (from which much of the IT PAYS ideas and philosophy has been borrowed) had five provincial championships in the 10 years prior to adopting a "equal opportunity" rule. They've had 5 championships in the four years since. They readily credit the "equal opportunity" rule as one of the reasons for their success.

So, if your team/coach/parents can't accept "equal opportunity" out of a sense of fairness (which should carry the day in youth sports at the Mite level, if not beyond), and winning is deemed to be more important at this age level than fairness, do it to 1) win more, 2) make more money 3) have happier parents, 4) have a bigger program, 5) create your version of Shanny.

This is probably more of an answer then you wanted to hear and I invite you to keep the dialogue open. Please discuss my response with your parents/coaches and if you think I'm offsides, please let me hear from you. If you do write back, we may get my father to respond... but I know whose team he's on in this regard.

Dan: Our son is a good player and has enjoyed being one of the better players in our house league. This year he's been invited to play for our Squirt travel team. The drawback is that we had no idea what it would cost, but are being told by other parents to budget US$7,000. These other parents warn us (and our coach agrees) if our son wants have a chance to play in college and get a scholarship, there's no alternative but to play travel and the sooner the better. I think I read somewhere that you didn't play travel hockey. What's a parent to do? Concerned Mother

Dear C.M.: This is question every parent has to answer for themselves. We do believe that in order to make the most improvement a player must be challenged, or as my father often says, "If your player is by far the best player in his league, he's in the wrong league."

While it is true that I only played one year of travel hockey when I was 14, the house league I played in had enlightened leadership and allowed me to play up, so I got all the challenge I need by playing PeeWee when I was a Squirt, etc.

My philosophy is - everything else being equal - I'd steer my son in the direction where he would have the most fun and maintain his love for the game.

Regarding your team's parents' and coaches' comments about a college scholarship, it's important to know that there are about 900,000 kids playing youth hockey in North America and no more than 50 Div I (scholarship) programs. My back-of-the envelope calculation is that each of those kids has a 1 in 600 chance of a scholarship. That's an estimate.

But this is a fact. If you started now and your son played house leagues, and you put US$6,000 ($7,000 for travel less $1,000 for estimated annual cost of playing house leagues) in a scholarship fund until he was 18, at 5% interest it would grow to pay for 8 years of college tuition plus room and board at most state universities. In other words, you could put two kids through a state university for the cost of having one child have a 1 in 600 chance to earn a full-ride scholarship playing travel hockey.

A big Mighty Duck fan and especially talented photographer/artist fan of Dan has created a water color of Dan and donated it to benefit Dan's Charitable Trust Fund. It is matted and framed and is a rendering of photograph. To see this photograph, click here. The print is signed by the author and it will be personalized to the winning bidder and signed by Dan. Our thanks to Diane Roe for this gift of her talent.

This will be a kids-only auction and will begin now and end at 9:00 p.m. on November 10, 2002. Minimum incremental bids will be $1.00 and we'll include a personalized and autographed of our new WWII-basketball historical novel when it is available. Dan has several friends who match the winning kid's bid, so every dollar you bid will be worth from $3 to $4 to Dan's Trust Fund.

As we said in the last issue, we're going to review some of the things we emphasized at hockey camp. It's review for those of you who attended. If you didn't attend, you get the lesson without the fun. The most important thing we talked about is skating from the seated position. Another way to say that is to skate with your weight-bearing knee at a 90% angle to your lower leg. This is important because the longer your stride, the faster you will skate with the same energy. Skating with a longer stride makes the most efficient use of the power you can muster from your legs. To demonstrate that, here are two pictures of skaters from my camp. One is a newcomer and one has been coming for several years.

the point where his toe winds up. The distance between the pencils demonstrates that he can stride about twice as far from the seated position. None of you skate standing straight up, but the demonstration shows the principle.

The other thing to notice is that in order for Black Sox to accomplish that great knee bend, there must also be an angle where the leg comes out of the boot of the skate. So it isn't just getting your butt lower, but you must also develop an angle so your knee is forward of your ankle.

How does one develop the ability to skate with the long strides that a 90-degree knee or skating in a seated position can give you? Practice. Here is a drill you can do every time you warm up before a game or a practice. Start with your feet under you and slightly apart. Get in a seated position with your butt as low as you can get it, remembering there must be a slight angle where your leg comes out of your boot (that is your knees should be ahead of your ankles), and keep your head and chest up. Then, staying in that position, push off as hard and as far to the side as you can - gliding on your weight-bearing foot while remaining in that position. Just before you glide to a stop, push off again with the same leg - remaining in the seated position. Then change legs. The goal here is not speed, you can add that later. You need to retrain your muscles to become accustomed to skating in that seated position. If you are doing it right, it will hurt a bit until your muscles get used to the mechanics of skating that way.

What if you have learned to skate pretty fast in the position of White Sox? Why change? Because if you want to advance in the sport, doing it wrong with good temporary results is no substitute for doing it right. You may be fast enough now, but as you get older, the people who are doing it right will blow past you, no matter how hard you work at doing it wrong.

And by the way, Mr. Black Sox is flying past the camera and is on his fourth stride. Mr. White Sox is on his sixth stride at the exact same place on the ice. Which points out that you have to work harder to do it wrong and you still won't be faster. Of course, Mr. White Sox will be flying past the camera next year.

P.S. We are saddened to learn that Yuka Nojima - the young woman who came from Japan to attend our Travel Skills and Adult camp this summer - suffered a broken leg in an elite women's tournament game in Japan. The break was serious enough to require surgical repair with a ceramic plate. We wish her a speedy recovery. If you came to know Yuka at camp and would like to send her a note, I'm sure she would appreciate receiving some get-well wishes from America. Her Email address is yuka28@hotmail.com.

DAN’S HONOR ROLL

I think your academic progress is so very important that I have an academic Honor Roll; I don't have an honor roll for hat tricks and shutouts. I hope each of you are diligent in your studies and can either raise your GPA by one point, or can attain a 3.5 GPA and be listed here.

NAME

AGE

GPA

SCHOOL

TEAM

STATE

Ross Hinkle

3.67

Wayland Middle School

G.R. Grizzlies PeeWee AA

MI*‡

Shannon Kelsey

4.0

Estero High School

Pinch a Penny Womens League

FL‡

Lucas Kelsey

3.57

Three Oaks Middle School

Jr. Everblades Bantam A

Cliff Jones

3.86

Spring Lake Middle School

Muskegon Chiefs Bantam B3

MI*‡

Marshall Jones

4.0

Spring Lake Intermediate

Lakeshore House - Bonners

MI*‡

Brad Christiansen

3.83

White Pines Middle School

Norton Shores (Vers. Fab) PeeWee

MI*‡

I can make lot's of room for you here

I hope all of you set a goal to make this list. To qualify you must have a GPA (on a 4.0 scale A= 4.0, A- = 3.75, B+ = 3.25, B= 3.0, etc) of 3.50 or better, an average overall grade improvement (or OGI) of at least one full grade over last year, or a Teacher Recommendation (or TR) which must be Emailed directly to me by your teacher and be based on outstanding achievement in a non-letter graded situation. When you qualify, Email your name, age, GPA or improvement, school, team, and state to Number21@DanBylsma.com

* Attendees of my hockey camp. ‡ Indicates repeat offenders.

After one of the Ducks' practices I attended, a Mini-Mite team took the ice for a practice. The drills were elementary skating and stick handling drills and it was fun to watch these munchkins - many with jerseys big enough to resemble a skirt. The coaches attempted to teach them to lean into their turns. The skaters were taught to stride to a face off circle and then lean toward the dot as they glided around half of it and then continued to stride to the next circle. To teach them to lean into the circle, the instructors or coaches told the skaters to hold their stick with the outside hand and lean toward the center enough to touch the ice with the glove on their inside hand.

One by one, the little munchkins lost their edge and fell. "Faster, faster, lean more, lean more", encouraged the instructors and the faster they went and the more they leaned, the more they lost their edge and fell. It was painful to watch.

As Dan has written before in this Newsletter and answered in the Q&A section of the web site, you don't lean into the center of a turn, you lean away from the center. It's not surprising to see turning being taught that way. Dan readily admits he didn't learn this until well into his professional career when Robby Glantz came to a L.A. Kings practice as a skating instructor.

As those of you who ski know, there are a lot of correlations with skating and skiing and their use of edges. If skier traverses the hill, she uses her edges to keep her skis from slipping out from under her. If she leans toward the hill her edges will become parallel to the hill and her skis will slip out from under. She needs to lean away from the hill, keep her center of gravity over her skis so her edges aren't parallel and will have some bite into the snow.

If a skater thinks of the center of the circle of a turn as the side of the mountain, the more she leans toward the center, the more she approaches the point where her blades will be parallel to the ice and she will lose her edge just as the munchkins did in the practice I saw, and the more they leaned, the more their skates were prone to slip out from under them. Skaters need to lean away from the center of their turns just as skiers need to lean away from the mountain.

For a more complete discussion of leaning away from the circle - so you don't make the same mistake as the instructors or coaches I saw teaching the munchkins, see Q&A#64 for Dan's explanation, and Q&A#74 for two contributors who use different word images and examples to explain the same concept.

In case you missed it, The Hockey News had an article in the October 7 issue about Dan's IT PAYS initiative. Click here for a link to the article.

Jack Nicklaus when asked how many championship golfers will come out of the 500,000 kids he hopes will take part in his initiative to give America's youth a chance to develop life-enhancing values through golf. Sports Illustrated, October 28, 2002

My parents just spent a week here in Anaheim. It was a great time as they were able to see some games (including my goal against the Kings) and we went to an ALCS game (Minnesota vs. Anaheim) and I was able to take my father to the second game of the World Series. That was an amazing experience and Barry Bonds' home run in the 9th landed just a few feet in front of us. I read later it was a 485-foot blast.

One of the great resources you have as a player is your parents. I've come to learn that for as smart as I think I might be at age 32, my father has 30 years more experience than I do. And as I write in the second book, for as smart as you think you are at your age, your parents were that smart 20 or 30 years ago. So I use my parents as a great resource. They help me in many ways as I learn to be a good husband, parent, homeowner, etc. I encourage you to make good use of that resource, and not just when you're a kid.

My father always comes to practices when he is in town. He sits in the stands and usually seems engrossed in a book, but I know that he watches what's going on. As Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot by watching." And on the ride home we talk. One of the things we talked about is how many of you might be surprised at what an NHL practice is like. While I go through them all the time, my father sees them only occasionally so he sees them with different eyes. And you know what strikes him every time he sees a practice? How much of the practice is devoted to improving skating, puck handling, and passing skills.

He said, "From what I've seen, players in a NHL practice work more on improving their skating and stick skills than the average team does in youth hockey. Starts, stops, circling, balance, crossovers, flip passes, catching passes, shooting, etc. I don't think you worked on breakouts but for more than 10 minutes out of the hour. Then you stayed after practice and worked more on shooting and passing."

I thought about that and I think he's probably right. You and your coaches probably don't think we practice on fundamentals as much as we do. For example, here's a drill that we do often. Start at the blue line about a few feet to center ice of the face-off dot. Race to the opposite blue line. Do a hard stop, then run on the toes of your skates sideways to the near boards and a hard stop, and then race to the center red line where you do a hard stop. Then run on the toes of your skates sideways back to even with the face-off circle and a hard stop and then a dash back to the original blue line where you do a hard stop. Everyone does five of them. There should be a hint in here for you if you aspire to play in the NHL - it isn't all play.

Two players did a passing drill that caught my father's fancy. One stands at a face-off dot facing the boards with a bunch of pucks, the other stands on the face-off circle behind the first player - also with a bunch of pucks. The player at the dot banks a puck off the boards aiming at the spot where the blue line intersects. The second player then attempts to hit the moving puck with a pass after it deflects off the boards. This is a drill that's often done after practices when all sorts of "games" are played that are designed to improve your skill. From experience I know that many of you can't consistently hit a cone from across the width of the rink. Think about hitting a moving puck, say 3 times out of ten tries.

So this is a word for both players, coaches, and parents. No matter what level you're at, the game is made up of players with skills. And the more they practice their skills, the better they will be able to play the game. And it's just as true at my level as it is at yours.

So Your Son Wants to Play In The NHL Published in 1998 by Sleeping Bear Press in the US and McClelland & Stewart in Canada. HC $24.95. The story of Dan’s journey from the ice rink in our back yard to the NHL. “This is the best hockey advice since ‘Don’t rile Gordie Howe’”. "This is more than a hockey book. It's a book about life and how to use simple lessons and values for success. …a refreshing straight-ahead approach that makes you feel that you've learned something." LA Times. Autographed and personalized copies available at www.DanBylsma.com.

So You Want to Play In The NHL Published in November, 2000, by NTC/ Contemporary/McGraw-Hill. Trade paperback—$14.95. Thirty-five questions that aspiring young athletes have and Dan’s and Jay’s alternating answers. Forward by Luc Robitaille. This book won’t help you play the game better, but we think it will help you live the game better. “I am making this book required reading for my team because it confirms everything I have ever said in the locker room and to parents.” Coach John M. You can read a chapter by clicking here. Autographed and personalized copies available at www.DanBylsma.com.

Pitcher’s Hands is OUT! Is finally out! (released) and you can get it at on line on the web site or at Barnes & Noble. Published in February by River Road Publications. HC $15.95. A historical novel about what it was like to be a kid living in the Great Depression. It’s a great baseball tale. “…a wonderful story – rich in historical detail, full of excitement, warmth, and humor – a story that readers of all ages will not want to end.” "These father-son authors... made a literary double play." Grand Rapids Press. You can read a chapter by clicking here. You can get autographed, personalized copies at www.DanBylsma.com.

COMING IN November, 2002 - Slam Dunks Not Allowed! - another historical novel is coming – this one about basketball and World War II. Many of the same characters you will read about in Pitcher Hands is OUT! – Scooter, Woody, Doolie and Dutchie - are now on the High School basketball team. "The Bylsma writing team takes a page from the history of basketball and sets it against the backdrop of WWII to create a dramatic, touching and often funny novel." Published by River Road Publications. HC $15.95. You can read part of a chapter from the original manuscript by clicking here.

If you know of another player or his family who might enjoy Dan’s Newsletter “From the Right Wing…”, feel free to forward the newsletter along. Coaches are welcome to send the names and Email addresses of their entire team - we're happy to sign them all up.

If you are reading the Newsletter because someone passed it along and would like to receive the Newsletter for yourself, Email your first and last name to newsletter@DanBylsma.com.

You are also welcome to reprint articles of the newsletter in your hockey newsletter. See Q&A # 51 on the website for the proper way to do that.

If you have a question you would like to ask Dan or Jay, Email your question to questions@DanBylsma.com. You can see the questions asked and answered on the Q&A page on Dan’s web site unless you ask that the response be confidential.