[Play Better Hockey: 50 Essential Skills For Player Development Ron Davidson
Oludare Padilla
Following the smash success of Play Better Hockey, the second edition of Ron Davidson's best-selling volume has been retooled with even more individual skill advancements for the modern player.
Play Better Hockey: 50 Essential Skills for Player Development Ron Davidson
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From fundamentals to high-level skills, Play Better Hockey gives players the tools they need to become the next superstars of the NHL by focusing on the development of individual hockey skills and by promoting a mastery of body positioning, skating and stick work. Learning these skills gives players a strong fundamental understanding of how to move effectively on the ice in any gameplay situation.
The high-intensity on-ice curricula for the Boys Junior Prep Hockey Camp is designed & implemented each day by our professional NHL, NCAA and/or Junior A coaching staff. Drawing from their countless years of coaching and scouting, these coaches are able to design a program that will best prepare each player for Junior and/or NCAA hockey.
These camps are treated like overall skill development and team camps, and as such the our staff view them as a training camp focusing on speed, intensity, systems, puck movement, small zone games, battles, and competitions. In addition, we include individual skill development to better allow our players the ability to incorporate their individual skills into the overall development and game situations created in the camp. Proper player development, through the proper development of individual skills and an in-depth understanding of tactical team situations, is the goal of every Prep Camp.
This camp is not a straight up skaters' camp nor is it a straight up Goaltenders' camp. It is a camp that is geared towards preparing all players for Junior and NCAA hockey and is treated as an overall skill development and team camp. And as such, we have added a goalie specific coach to be on-ice with each group, each day working solely with the goaltenders.
Each night, all players will take part in a 1-hour specialty ice session. These sessions have become very popular with the players as they focus on specific skills each player wants to work on and are a chance for each athlete to work one-on-one with the coaches on individual skills such as skating, shooting, goaltending, movement, face-offs, etc.
All Junior Prep Camp players participate in an evaluation skate the first night of camp each week and are then placed into groups based on their age and ability to ensure proper competition and development levels within the groups. Each group will be comprised of two teams and preliminary groupings will be posted the following morning prior to the days' first on-ice session. These teams will practice with each other during every activity throughout the week, and will compete against each other during the three weekly Showcase Games.
PLEASE NOTE: These groups ARE NOT FINAL and all players are subject to movement within the groups based on their on-ice performance at ANY TIME throughout the week. In fact, many players do get moved from group to group as the evaluations are based on a 60-minute performance and are therefore very preliminary in nature. However, this is a necessary precaution to ensure the physical safety of each player in camp.
The off-ice training program is designed and implemented by Colorado College Head Strength Coach Cam Davidson and staff. It will focus on the development of hockey-based physical strength and stamina and is the same program used by the NCAA D1 Colorado College Tigers Hockey Team. These sessions will focus on the proper execution and understanding of the drills and exercises necessary to develop and strengthen the athletes' core muscle groups through the use of conditioning, resistance training, free weights and stretching. The goal is to develop the hockey players' power, agility, speed, and balance, while at the same time not compromising the players' flexibility. The coaches will discuss how to continue this development during the off-season by discussing proper eating and training regiments.
The coaches will run the athletes through a number of core muscle strength, conditioning and flexibility drills utilized by the NHL in the free weights room and gymnasium to achieve the desired results. The goal is to not only improve each player's overall core strength and flexibility at the camp, but too also properly educate the players on how to properly continue this development training long after they depart the camp.
Along with the 2x daily Strength Training sessions, each camper will attend daily College and/or Junior Hockey Seminars. These seminars will focus on a number of various topics all related to the Business of Hockey. Topics will include college and junior hockey, recruiting and exposure opportunities, Junior team try-outs, the importance of good grades, successful systems and tactics currently being utilized by collegiate and professional teams, getting along with your coaches, how to get noticed, how to promote yourself, what to do when a team expresses interest in you, mental toughness, what do coaches and scouts look for in a player on-ice, off-ice and in the classroom.
Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.
What stirs me to return to the subject? I was urged by a reader, Mark Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC by Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is bright, confident, persuasive. But she is mistaken.
I propose to take an unfair advantage. She spoke extemporaneously. I have the luxury of responding after consideration. If you want to follow along, I urge you to watch her talk, which is embedded below. It's only 15 minutes long, and she makes the time pass quickly.
She begins by saying video games "already ARE art." Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear.
Then she shows a slide of a prehistoric cave painting, calling it "kind of chicken scratches on walls," and contrasts it with Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her point is that while video games may be closer to the chicken scratch end of the spectrum, I am foolish to assume they will not evolve.
She then says speech began as a form of warning, and writing as a form of bookkeeping, but they evolved into storytelling and song. Actually, speech probably evolved into a form of storytelling and song long before writing was developed. And cave paintings were a form of storytelling, perhaps of religion, and certainly of the creation of beauty from those chicken-scratches Werner Herzog is even now filming in 3-D.
Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern France should only be looked at in the context of the shadows cast on those dark walls by the fires built behind the artists, which suggests the cave paintings, their materials of charcoal and ochre and all that went into them were the fruition of a long gestation, not the beginning of something--and that the artists were enormously gifted. They were great artists at that time, geniuses with nothing to build on, and were not in the process of becoming Michelangelo or anyone else. Any gifted artist will tell you how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among.
Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most articulate definition of art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.
Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined as the imitation of nature. Seneca and Cicero essentially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas...Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction."
But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Yes, but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't start dancing all at once.
One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.
She quotes Robert McKee's definition of good writing as "being motivated by a desire to touch the audience." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are so motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would argue that his novels are so motivated. But when I say McCarthy is "better" than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the taste of anyone who prefers Sparks).
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