Hockey Has a Problem
I’ve spent my entire adult life involved in the sport of hockey. From playing to coaching and then as a strength and conditioning coach, I’ve worked at the lowest and highest levels of the game. I’ve seen what it takes to get to the next level and the problems that will cause kids who should make it to not make it, and I’ve seen those at the highest levels not have the career they should have. The development model we currently have in the United States is decreasing the likelihood that you’ll reach the highest levels of hockey. From money, to skill development, to game time, and even politics, hockey has a serious problem.
Hyper Focus on Skill Development
Skill development is incredibly important. You should spend time creating a skillset and honing your craft. However, what most of your coaches aren’t telling you (at least down here in Florida), is that your skillset will be null at the next level. Are you a goal scorer for your 16U AAA team? You’re gonna be a spare part and grind when you hit junior hockey. You’re the best kid at your local rink? So is everyone else who made your junior team. Outside of the rare exception (Connor Bedard, Connor McDavid, etc.), when you make the jump to the next level, your role will change. You will have to do two things:
Physical preparation off of the ice
Learn to actually play the game
I’ve worked in the sport long enough to see tons of kids’ worlds shatter when they get to the next level because they’re unable to play the game the way they did when they were back home. Hell, I went from being the leading scorer in both the high school league and our state travel league to being a healthy scratch in my first game of junior. Then, I went from being the captain of the second-best junior B team in the country to being a healthy scratch in my first 7 NCAA games. My family had even booked trips to come and watch that first game at Nichols College, and I was sitting in the stands right next to them. It sucked. I was a goal scorer at the AA level and a spare part at the junior level in my first year. I was finally a goal scorer and someone the team really leaned on my second year of junior, and then again a spare part at the NCAA level. You have to be ready to take on new roles when you make that jump to the next level of play. You won’t be able to play the game the same way, so you better have good hockey IQ and be a solid skater.
The biggest kicker? You’re not going to be able to use those silky mitts at the next level when you’re battling for third or fourth-line minutes. You’re going to have to back-check, forecheck, hit, and play defensively. You’re going to have to understand the systems your team plays like the back of your hand. Third and fourth liners are there to give the team energy and give the guys meant to score time to rest and recover. Your job is to not get scored on, not to score.
Why does this matter? Well, because today’s youth sports world is hyper-focused on skill development. I coached a 16U team back in 2019, and there wasn’t a single kid on that team who understood a proper forecheck, had ever run a legitimate penalty kill forecheck, and no one had been coached in how to actually backcheck with purpose. We had to start from scratch with a bunch of kids who could stickhandle around all the cones but couldn’t play hockey, because none of them had an understanding of the game. At this age (16U), many kids are heading off to play higher-level hockey or junior hockey, and these teams don’t have time to correct these issues. You’ll start off riding the pine pony and that’s if you’re dressing at all.
This hyper-focus on hockey skill development also leaves many kids behind the eight-ball when it comes to off-ice preparation. From a young age, kids are taught that working off the ice is important, but 9 times out of 10, this off-ice work is a hockey coach running them through drills that don’t help them develop as athletes or even a hockey player. Cone and ladder drills won’t move the needle, but they make you tired which gives the perception of progression. This leads to kids often having their first taste of actua; training when they’re 17 or 18 years old. I hate to say it, but by this point, it’s almost too late for most kids. More on that later.
This hyper-focus on skill development is leaving many kids weak and ill-prepared to move on to the next level, and then stick. USA Hockey preaches what they call the ADM, but they don’t actually adhere to this model in any way, shape, or form. This needs to change.
Money
Money is the reason we have more options for our kids to play sports growing up, but it’s also the reason we’ll have fewer and fewer kids reaching their potential. I’ve written about this quite a bit and you can find one of those articles here, but what’s happened with youth sports is that we’ve essentially turned kids into a commodity. We build these organizations, facilities, and programs that have massive price tags, and those costs get passed on to the consumer, or families in this case.
This means that sports have become astronomically high. Your average family spends $10,000+ on youth sports every year. Between team fees, apparel fees, private skills coaches, traveling, and equipment, families are being taken for every extra dime they have. If you’re interested, I did an episode on Strength Coach Rants about the cost of youth sports today. It’s a good watch, and you’ll be surprised at what families are doing in an effort to pay the bills of these sports.
I mention money specifically when it comes to hockey because the costs are absolutely wild, and they’ve only gotten worse in the past four years. The reasons for this are two-fold as organizations have to recoup the money lost in 2020 when they couldn’t compete/train, and inflation has been a total mess the past four years. The average hockey family with a kid playing AAA spends no less than 15-20k per year, and many families are spending significantly more than that. Then, you’ve got pay to play Tier III junior hockey here in the States, and families are paying anywhere between 10-15k a year for that.
Down here in Florida, we have one AAA program. That’s all that is allowed by SAHOF. It is called the Alliance and it consists of players from all over the state. More recently, some age levels have divided the state by North and South, but that still leaves only roughly 30 roster spots for the third most populous state in the country. If you’re interested in the numbers, check out this episode of Strength Coach Rants where I break down how badly Florida is getting screwed when it comes to AAA hockey.
We’re pricing out so many kids who could be amazing players but are never given the chance to play the game. Even rec hockey will run you a few thousand dollars per year. This is a huge barrier to entry for most families. In fact, when polled upwards of 30% of families with hockey players either borrowed money from family or took out a personal loan with the bank so their kids could play. This isn’t a sustainable model for the greatest sport on Earth and it damn sure doesn’t run in line with “hockey in for everyone.”
Are you a hockey parent dumping tens of thousands of dollars into travel hockey? Give this 🧵 a read pic.twitter.com/t1Ka7jQtbg
— The Based Strength Coach (@based_coach1) August 26, 2024
I did a podcast episode titled The Youth Sports Industry is a Racket on my podcast Strength Coach Rants. You can find it by clicking the above link. I had a clip from that episode blow up on Instagram with over 1.1 million views currently. Tons of other accounts clipped it and shared their own version on their pages. Altogether, from the ones that I saw, at least, there were probably 3-4 million total views across all platforms. In every single comment thread, parents were complaining about the costs of hockey, which fall somewhere between $70,000-414,000 if you play “high-level” hockey from 12U-20U. The hope is to chase a scholarship to go to school for free. If you’re interested in learning the numbers on that, check out this thread I put together.
I don’t know how to fix this problem, and I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon. You’ve got venture capitalists like Black Bear purchasing up entire swaths of rinks and then nickel-and-diming families completely out of the sport. We’ve turned youth sports, hockey specifically, into a monthly rental fee and the sport is going to suffer in the long run.
The New NCAA/CHL Agreement
This is a big one that has set the hockey world on fire. This is going to change everything we know about hockey development in North America for the foreseeable future. We’ve just added a little less than 1200 kids to the eligible pool of players at the NCAA Division I level. Major junior hockey players won’t be eligible to play at the DIII or DII (there are still 7 or 8 DII programs left) levels, but opening up DI as a destination for these kids will inevitably push kids down the pipeline who otherwise would have been picked up by a DI program.
This poses a few problems for US-based hockey programs and leagues:
The most talented kids are going to want to play in the CHL. This will have an effect on the USHL and the NAHL.
Kids eligible for the US National Team Development Program (18U and 17U) may leave for greener pastures, where they can get paid for their talents. This could be disastrous for US development.
The best kids will no longer be playing under the scope of USA Hockey.
Everything in the US (if no changes are implemented) when it comes to hockey, will become subpar.
USA Hockey’s known this was coming for years now, and lobbied the NCAA hard to keep this from becoming a reality earlier. I’ve spoken with directors and board members at USA Hockey events and they said they were ready for this very thing and I hope they are.
Outside of the organization of USA Hockey, this is going to affect hockey development in general down here in the US. This skill-based model of specialization at a young age is going to get pushed HARDER by these programs because now, the goal is going to be to play major-junior hockey. There’s going to be an even bigger push to get these kids “ready” to play a grueling 68-game schedule, plus playoffs, plus the Memorial Cup by having them play 70-80 game schedules at a young age (it’s already happening but my fear is that it will become worse). This is going to be a disaster for development, there’s no way around it.
This move has an opportunity to crush development in the US, but it can also light a fire under the US hockey community if used right.
Lack of Physical Development
Earlier, we talked about the hyper-focus towards on-ice skills. This focus often leads to off-ice movement skills never really being developed. Here are a few truths to your training:
Your training off the ice should look NOTHING like hockey
Conditioning off the ice is a complete waste of your time
Long-term athletic development is just that, long-term. It should be looked at through this scope
Many hockey players are doing off-ice work geared toward hockey, which will inevitably leave them injured
Hockey-specific training off the ice will destroy your mobility and movement efficiency and believe it or not, leave them worse off on the ice
Cone drills and agility ladders will make you tired, but they won’t make you agile or fast
I own a gym where I work mostly with kids, and mostly with hockey players. The past five years I’ve seen an enormous change in the people who are walking through my doors. Most kids I work with are immobile, cannot move well, are weak, can’t jump or sprint, and are constantly tired on the ice. Many times their coaches think they need to work on their conditioning but when we start our evaluations, it’s easy to see what is causing all of their problems:
They’re weak, so sprinting on the ice is always a maximal effort movement. They lack the strength to be fast, and more importantly, they lack the strength to deal with the forces associated with changing directions on the ice.
Their hips are incredibly immobile. I’m talking like geriatric population levels of immobility in the hips. It’s actually wild because their hip abduction (a prime mover in skating) is typically pretty awful. Their groins are super tight, and their abductors are super weak. This contributes to their lack of speed and endurance because it takes so much effort just to take a stride fighting against all that tightness.
They can’t jump, sprint, or even move laterally/multi-directionally. Since they’ve really not done much off the ice with a strength and conditioning professional, they’ve never been taught how to move. Learning this at a younger age is vastly superior to trying to learn in your later teens.
They struggle to transfer force in a general sense
Hockey is a sport currently stuck in a money-grab phase, much like other sports. Due to this, skills coaches will often either try to get you to do their “off-ice” training or will steer you away from it completely because any money or time spent with a strength coach is money or time not spent with them. Hockey isn’t alone in this either, but I would say this has been a big change that I’ve seen in the past few years.
I worked the USA Hockey 17U Development Camp in Buffalo over the summer. The best hockey players in the country were all under one roof. I come from the Southeast District, so I spent a bunch of time working with and watching them. You see, down here in Florida wev’ve got a pretty big problem when it comes to off-ice development. As I said before, we’re currently in a huge money-grab phase, so most kids spend exactly zero hours per week off the ice unless it’s team-mandated with their hockey coaches. The Southeast team was HIGHLY skilled but lacked the ability to get through the week because they were so broken by the last game. The reason for this is that they spend all their time on the ice practicing hockey skills, and no time developing off-ice skills like strength and speed. This led to a perfect storm of playing great on day one and two, and then getting shelled the rest of the week (they lost the last place game by 7 or 8 goals).
If you want your kid to be successful, true off ice development HAS to be part of the equation and it needs to be done under the supervision of a certified strength and conditioning specialist. This is a HUGE part of the equation that is being pushed to the side in favor of coaches, rinks, and organizations taking more of your money.
How Do We Fix This?
I honest to God don’t know how to fix the issues of cost other than for parents to start saying “no” when it comes to these useless “development” programs, which are void of anything resembling development. The IIHF did a study a few years back that showed that it takes roughly 11 games to equal the development (puck touches, shots, situations, passes, etc) that happens in a practice. That means your child’s 60+ game schedule is the equivalent of another 5 practices. One of the largest costs of hockey is the travel for games and tournaments. If we really want to clean this up I think we really need to take a look at our game schedules. Development would see a big jump if we did this as well.
The hyper-focus on skill is an easy fix. We just have to convince coaches and parents that skill development should really be limited in favor of power skating, off-ice training, and practices. You’re spending $100+ on a skills session with a coach, but if the team all got together and pooled that money they’d be able to buy three hours of practice ice where they could work on situational play. This is the way to increase hockey IQ and push the development of those silky mitts down the road. You’d see a surge in American hockey excellence if we pushed for even a little bit of this.
The CHL/NCAA agreement is a little bit trickier. There’s no undoing this. However, if we take this as ammunition to change the development model for the better, I think it becomes a non-issue. Get away from spring and summer hockey, push power skating, off-ice training, and practice. If you truly want to develop a model that works, this is the only way.
