Great point DMom.DMom wrote:When I look at the list of 98 teams playing in the Caribou Cup (which it is good to see the success of this tournament) I have to wonder if there are really that many coaches available. Coaches who can actually develop the kids. Than I have to think of the skilled instructors who have been canceling skating camps. They have to, their core group are spending 2,000$ on summer hockey teams and have nothing left to spend on skills camps.
District 2 is offering a fabulous Bantam Camp with great instructors with decades of hockey experience, and it didn't fill on the first day??? http://www.d2hockey.org/page/show/10103 ... t-2-events
There's something wrong here when instructors of this caliber are passed over by local families. And I am not as confident as others that lots of summer ice is good, the quality of instruction can give much more improvement than 200 hours of ice with sub-par instruction.
In our case, I don't think that the issue was with the coaches. They were just doing what they were told to do. There were a ton of hours at the rink and most of them were spent on basic skating development. A very small proportion of the time was spent on offensive drills and almost nothing on defensive play. The goalies should probably get a free pass for the development they get during these practices. Again not a reflection of the coaches. They have an itinerary.
I really didn't have a problem with all the time being spent on skating skills either, as I am a "Marathoner" rather than a "Sprinter" when it comes to developmental expectations for my 9 year old. As Muck likes to point out a lot of changes happen with these boys when they hit puberty, so I am just making sure my kids have a great foundation of skating skills right now. I'm not too worried about the rest of it.
My concern is with the organization. The tournament scheduling was atrocious. They took a brand new team with new coaches and decided to play in two invite level tournaments. In order to even compete in them we had to have a couple of orange guest players play on our team. We should have played in the open level of the International and Easton Cups. The kids would have been more competitive and maybe won some games on their own, and I wouldn't be so crabby.