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Childhood Sports Come and Go, but Hockey Never Left

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Childhood Sports Come and Go, but Hockey Never Left

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Like countless other kids, I was involved in numerous sports growing up. You name it - hockey, baseball, track, tennis, golf, and swimming. I had initially begun my athletic career at the golf range and at the batting cages. I swung lefty in both sports, which was useful since they required similar movement mechanisms. So when it came to beginning my career as a hockey player, I naturally held the stick as I did with a bat and a golf club: lefty! I could easily use the motor skills I learned with golf and baseball to exhibit positive transfer in skill and speed I learned into an effective hockey shot. Unfortunately for all the other sports, I knew hockey was my true passion, and one-by-one each sport started to disappear over the years. Little did my parents know they would be spending most of my childhood watching me place on the ice while they had to sit in cold ice rinks.

Fast forward a few years later to my new home when I entered middle school. My family, or should I say I, was blessed with an unfinished basement. Why was this so great? At this point in my life, I knew hockey would be the sport I would enjoy the most and give the majority of my attention to, so it allowed me to assemble my own hockey shooting area. The concrete floors of the basement mimicked the ice I would normally shoot on and the tennis ball I shot with is similar enough to a hockey puck with its small size. I would spend hours at a time down there, practicing new moves, improving my shot, and breaking things in my basement every once in a while. This environment was very similar to an ice rink (minus the freezing temperatures) so I did not have much trouble transferring my skills that I practiced in my basement to the ice during hockey practice and games. Even though I was not practicing on the ice, practicing in my basement allowed me to utilize these identical elements to improve overall as a shooter and stick-handler.

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One of the many unique aspects of hockey is the dynamic speed, hand-eye coordination, balance, strength, and many more skills that must be combined to become an effective player. Also, we play on ice!!! You can't just find an ice rink at the local playground, and not many other sports play on a frictionless surface. At the end of the day, being good at hockey comes down to individual differences and motor abilities. Hockey is largely dominated by males which supports the evidence that males tend to outperform females in most motor tasks. However, the popularity of women's hockey is steadily growing. The fast pace and physical demand of the game favors a large and fast athlete. There are a number of smaller players in the NHL, but they need to make up for their size with exceptional skill.
As a 6'0", 200-pound defenseman, I was around the upper-average size compared to the rest of the hockey players in my leagues, giving me a size advantage over most of my competition. However, I will admit that smaller players may have gotten past me once or twice with their skill and speed, but I swear I shut down most of them. The fast pace of the game favors those who have fast information processing abilities to make quick motor decisions at a moment's notice. You almost have to think strategically what will happen before it even happens, such as timing a pass with speed and direction to your teammate before he is even in that spot, all while moving at high speed. While I highly encourage everyone to give hockey a chance, only those who  are superior in these individual-difference variables have the best chance of becoming exceptional hockey players.

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Another skill necessary for any good hockey player is being able to make a pass or a shot from anywhere on the ice. I retained this useful strategy after years of practice and playing with many of the same teammates so that I knew exactly where they would be. In order to do this, I had to practice shooting from the numerous angles and distances from the net in a random order because you never know where you will be shooting the puck from in an actual game. I was lucky to have our own ice rink on my high school campus. Almost every morning, before school, I had access to the entire ice rink to myself. I was also lucky enough to be a morning person because most of my other teammates were still sleeping during this time. My usual practice consisted of throwing a bag of pucks all over the ice and the pucks would all land in random locations. I would go to each one and shoot the puck to the net in whatever location it was at relative to the net. After all the pucks were shot, I would then again repeat this process and continue to determine the motor process that was going to be the most successful in scoring a goal. This random practice allowed me to integrate the direction and speed of my shot. Although there was a high amount of contextual interference during shooting practice, I had developed action plans into my working memory that could be effective in a game to the point where sometimes I did not even have to look where I was shooting. Shooting at the net without directly looking at the goalie also became automatic to me because I had mastered the dimensions and location of the net wherever I was on the ice because it was in the same place at any point. I wasn't always the most accurate when I started doing this and most of my shots included me looking at the net when I shot it. However, this did help pose another skill of deception in games that helped me to improve my ability as a player.

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As many people know, hockey is a fast and dynamic sport that requires high-level decision making skills. In order to excel in this sport, many motor processes need to become automatic, and this can develop over time with practice and correction. Doing so will lead to less time processing the characteristics of a movement and more time focusing on other attention demands on the external environment. Stick-handling is a great example of this. Stick-handling involves moving the puck back and forth between both sides of the blade of your stick on the ice in order to maintain control of the puck, avoid opposing players, and protecting the puck from being stolen from you. This skill can be challenging for even professional hockey players! Mastering stick-handling can pose a threat of deception to the opposing team.

This skill cannot be learned overnight. Over many years, my stick-handling improved in many phases. When I was little, I was only able to move the puck very slowly back and forth and my eyes were focused on the puck about 99% of the time. As I got older, my stick-handling speed increased and I was able to focus less and less on the puck and more on the rest of the arena as I moved, developing different ways to use this skill to beat my opponent. Around high school was when I became very confident in my stick-handling abilities that I could automatically stickhandle without having to give much attention to what I was doing with my hands and had developed specific stick-handling moves that I could use in different situations. With vigorous amounts of time and practice, stick-handling became second nature to me, so that once it became automatic to throughout different stages of motor learning, I could begin to focus my attention to where players on my team were in relation to me as well as players on the opposing team. Trust me, you do not want to be caught with your head down focusing on stick-handling the puck in a game, or you will end up on your butt wondering what happened after getting hit by the other team. I've been there.

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It's every hockey player's dream to be the superstar that scores the game-winning goal. Few make this a reality. I myself have played this scenario many times in my head over the years, but I learned it wasn't the only thing I should focus on when it came to hockey. I have always been a very skilled visual thinker. Problem-solving strategies, learning new skills, and memory have always improved when I can physically see what is occurring. Therefore, I can vividly visualize it in my mind later when I need to apply them. I used this to my advantage when preparing for hockey games. Every team has their own set of designed plays for breaking out of the zone, moving the puck on the power-play, and just about any other situation in a game. My coaches would draw out where each of us should be whenever we had to implement these designed plays in a game. Rarely did I focus on scoring the game-winning goal, but instead focused on plays I knew were likely to happen by using internal imagery to mentally prepare for the options I would have on certain designed plays such as the power-play, breaking it out of the zone, or regrouping. I didn't always have time to practice on the ice or in my basement, so I would create these scenarios in my head in the locker room or when I was going to bed. One of my pregame rituals included sitting on the bench before a game, looking around the ice rink, and using external imagery to conceptualize certain plays in my head. Most of the time, these scenarios would actually happen in a game, and because I was mentally practicing simple plays in my head, this gave me the confidence to create many opportunities to score in a game because I had physically and mentally gone through it so many times.