Player Development Camps and The Wizard of Oz
Pay no attention to the man with the fancy jacket and whistle
So, swoop me up and take me to a
Different place like Dorothy's House
See, if I only had a brain, and a heart
Well, actually the opposite will
Have your music on these charts
So, fuck the wizard and the road I'm leaving Oz
And maybe this is new religious rap
'Cause I'm a motherfuckin' God!
The Wizard was seen as this untouchable, all knowing, God figure. And then he gets exposed…
We’re still not exposing the wizard in 2026 for some reason.
I think we’re choosing to not understand that all these people are just people with an opinion standing in a suit, track suit with a fancy logo or standing on NHL ice with a whistle…
They’re not untouchable. And they’re also leading people and the game in the wrong direction year after year…
This drill gets 1000 likes, and the local youth coach sets it up at his very next session.
Taking the game backwards.
Being done on NHL ice, it must be good… Right?
Not quite.
And then when people who have a clue but are still in the minority pipe up, the Wizards try to appear and tell people to ‘pay no attention’:
I like what Brian says here, other than the part where he ‘agrees’ with him. I don’t agree at all. But I like the last bit:
I’ll come back to this… Let’s go to Don Norman again.
“If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.”
― Donald A. Norman
Most of what is being done at these camps is safe, dull, and uninteresting.
Especially for the players.
And since they flew from the draft right to your town… You may want to provide a better first impression than skating through PEP’s.
And it also doesn’t answer the question, “can he play hockey?”
Movement information comes from the environment, and it’s trying to take the puck away from you or hit you. Rolling to your outside edge happens to avoid contact from a forechecker, not because you need to line dance on the ice.
More context, more real. More real, more it translates to the game.
The game matters more than anything.
Maybe take a page out of this team’s book and start reposting them.
Because the high-level teams are not doing ‘high-level stuff’. They also aren’t doing stuff that is right for your 8-16u player either…
Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain pulling the strings of obstacle courses, and other garbage in the name of ‘discovering their rate limiters’.
Please…
Imagine a coach saying, “Hey, can we remove all this chaos and representative information the game provides? I can’t tell what his limiting factors are with the real game going on.”
If you can’t observe those in context as a coach, it’s time to hang it up.
Be like Mike here…
Without context, the rate limiters you see are fugazzi. Some people can’t skate well when everything is made conscious but evade checks, skate well laterally to avoid stick checks, and make plays 1v1 in tight spaces when they aren’t thinking in the game. Some people don’t skate well in line-skating edgework down the ice but can create separation while being chased at full speed in a tag game like nobody’s business.
And it’s hard to see self-organization abilities (or inabilities) going half speed using half the shin angle you would at full speed in a cut on a defender because you don’t care about dangling a PEP… or when you’re 100% mentally and emotionally checked out from whatever Columbus was doing. It’s not the same movement. It’s not the same intention.
Therefore, it’s not worth extracting insight from.
Expose limitations in context. Observe their self-organization when the ‘skating’, ‘puckhandling’, etc are unconscious in game-like situations.
Otherwise you might be studying the player for a test that doesn’t exist in reality. Here’s a related story on your way out.
Remember College?
We used to do these static, sterile mobility tests in Kinesiology classes in college before that sector of the universe took a quantum leap in understanding.
Shin angle: X degrees, this is what he’s capable of.
Then they’d watch a game, take a screenshot because something looked ‘different’ and measure... Greater than X degrees. Heads would roll. Turns out you can get into positions unconsciously in the moment that you don’t own consciously in the lab.
Go ahead, make a coaching observation out of context. Measure something out of context; you’ll be comparing apples to fucking spaceships.
More on Saginaw for the interested: