Fun on Ice

Dec. 4, 2015

League Hopes To Keep More Players By Making Hockey Fun

Reforms in Traverse City’s youth hockey league over the past few years are based on a counter-intuitive premise: If you make the sport more fun for kids, the league will produce more elite players.

The USA Hockey American Development Model (ADM) has been implemented in an effort to reverse the trend of fewer kids playing hockey each year. Despite being greeted warily by some parents, after five years, ADM seems to be paying off for the Grand Traverse Hockey Association (GTHA).

“To become an elite athlete is really hard; it’s mentally hard, it’s physically hard, and so you have to have perseverance. And, to have that, you have to have passion,” said Jason Gollan, GTHA growth coordinator. “So, for the first four or five years with these kids, we focus almost exclusively on fun, so that they want to come back — so that they tell Mom and Dad, ‘I want to go back to hockey. It’s so much fun.’”

PUT MORE KIDS ON THE ICE

While ADM touches all ages in the league, the youngest players — 5- or 6-yearold Mites who may be on skates for the first time — see the biggest change. Gollan said a lot of it comes down to the size of the game: Instead of playing on a full ice rink, younger kids now play cross-ice games in closer quarters.

“They get way more puck touches,” said Mike Matteucci, coach of a Traverse City Bantam A team that plays in the Little Caesars Amateur Hockey League Yzerman Division, which means his players are among the best 13-year-olds in the state. “It’s just better for their development.”

Matteucci, who played on the 1994 Lake Superior State University college national championship team and played professional hockey for nine years, said players develop skills when confined to small spaces that they wouldn’t otherwise.

Former Detroit Red Wing Dallas Drake, a hockey parent who coaches in the league, agreed that smaller rinks are better for small players.

“It puts them in an environment that allows them to succeed,” Drake said.

That’s because when little kids play on a full-sized rink, two or three of the biggest, fastest players dominate the game and everyone else is left out, he explained. On smaller ice, the puck bounces to everyone.

TEAMS ARE GETTING BETTER

Even though putting more teams on the ice at one time lowers the cost to play, the change upset some parents who didn’t like seeing kids playing on pint-sized rinks.

“At first, that was a big dilemma for a lot of parents, because they didn’t really consider it hockey, but the kids love it,” Drake said.

“They don’t really consider that hockey, but they also don’t consider where kids are going to be in 5, 10, 15 years.”

Matteucci said he heard the same concerns.

“They look at the NHL-ers and they look at the college players, and they see them playing on full ice, and they don’t understand why the kids have to play on smaller ice,” he said.

Drake said the added skills training has already paid off for teams across the league and he expects that will continue.

“We’ve been doing this for years now,” he said. “You can look; every team in our association’s been a beneficiary of that.”

Jeff Manker, parent of a 12-year-old who plays on a Pee Wee team, saw firsthand the benefits of an emphasis on skills training this season.

At the beginning of this season, GTHA increased the number of teams on a rink from two to four during most practices.

“I just heard some grumbling, like, maybe that’s too many kids on the ice at once; there’s not going to be enough room,” Manker said.

Trepidation gave way to appreciation, he shared, as parents watched the teams get better and better.

At a Pee Wee “house” tournament over the weekend of Nov. 20, 16 teams competed and three of the four GTHA teams made the semifinals.

“It ended up being an all-Traverse City final with, obviously, a Traverse City team winning, which is pretty rare,” Manker said. “These are teams from all over the state.”

Parent Lisa Carlson, who also has a 12-year-old on one of the Pee Wee teams, agreed.

“It was really a testament to what’s been happening these past five years since it was instituted,” Carlson said. “The way the kids played this weekend, this is how we expected the kids in previous years to look, maybe, in January.”

LOTS OF PROS IN TOWN

Another possible dividend from the ADM is Matteucci’s Bantam A team, an exceptional group that has grown up together in the five years since ADM was adopted.

Gollan said that, although Matteucci’s team is among the first to develop since the adoption of ADM, he doesn’t believe ADM explains their success.

Michael Poehlman Photography Photo by Marina Manushenko

“I would love to be able to say that, but I don’t think it’s true,” he said. “I actually just think Matteucci’s just an amazing coach. I mean, that ’s the reason, frankly.”

Matteucci believes his team is so successful because they’ve meshed as a unit.

“The biggest reason for our success is the kids really, truly have fun with each other; they trust each other,” he said.

Matteucci said changes in the GTHA began even before people started talking about ADM because Drake and other retired professional players were promoting cross-ice hockey and skills training years ago.

“To be honest, I guess before it was implemented, we had kids in Mites and we were doing similar things anyway,” Matteucci said.

The change in rink size accompanied a change in attitude toward the game. Matteucci said it had become clear in recent years that a philosophical change in the way coaches approached youth hockey was needed.

“Kids are different these days, you know?” he said. “It’s not like years ago when sometimes just yelling at a kid would motivate them. It’s like they all have ADD these days.”

USA Hockey and the NHL developed the ADM in response to declining participation in hockey nationwide. In 2010, across the country, 43 percent of kids who tried hockey quit by age nine. Since the rollout of ADM five years ago, participation is up 44 percent among kids ages 6–17, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association.

More kids playing hockey means more kids will excel at hockey, Gollan said. Ultimately, it might mean that kids from Traverse City play on Division 1 college teams or in the NHL.

“This is what USA Hockey tells us: If you want the best travel program, you need to have the best house program. You need to have the widest base possible for the pyramid,” Gollan said. “Because no one in the world can tell you which 9-year-old is going to be the best 19-year-old, so you need as many 9-year-olds as possible.”

PART OF HOCKEY’S CULTURAL SHIFT

ADM is also seeking another cultural shift: to make youth hockey less physical.

Body checking is allowed for older players, but it’s supposed to separate a player from the puck, not punish an opponent.

“The media culture is, they call it a hit, and that gets celebrated because it’s exciting on TV to see that, but if you talk to the retired professionals who live in town, they go and watch one of the high school hockey games and they’re shocked because, to them, it looks like football,” Gollan said.

The shift away from violence comes at a time when all professional sports, especially contact sports like hockey and football, are seeking to reduce the human toll and negative publicity that come from concussions.

“There is a cultural change that’s happening in all sports, but specifically in hockey:

the more traditional, aggressive, physicalbased North American game isn’t as effective in elite hockey as it used to be,” Gollan said, “because the Europeans, going back 30 years, focused on the skills — the discreet skills that are required to be excellent at the game.”

Gollan said the philosophical shift should be familar to Detroit Red Wings fans who watched the 1995 arrival of the Russian Five, a group of players that used skill and finesse to change the way professional hockey was played.

The game is no longer about dumping the puck into the offensive zone and then fighting for it; it’s about being able to possess the puck into the zone, he said.

“The whole game has sort of realized that the skill part of it is what leads to success,” Gollan said. “The physical aspect of the game is still there. It’s not going anywhere.”

“THAT’S HOW YOU GET BETTER”

Gollan’s son joined a team in 2011 after ADM had already been launched.

Today, most parents seem happy with the state of things, as the reforms have gradually been implemented over several years.

“They did try going whole-hog in ’09 and ’10, and there was a problem,” he said. “The parents, the members of the association were not into it.”

Now parents see the benefits.

Carlson likes how, under ADM, coaches are encouraged to help all the kids in the league, whether they’re on their team or not. That means a lot more help and feedback for each player.

Another improvement is that, with more kids on the ice at one time, each kid gets more total time playing. For Carlson’s son, for example, ice time increased from 55 hours last year to 78 hours this year. Yet, program costs stayed the same.

“That’s how you get better. If you don’t skate, you can’t improve,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how good you are at hitting something if you can’t get to it in the first place.”

ADM also reduces the amount of time players, and their families, spend on the road. One of the youngest travel teams, for instance, reduced the number of games each year from over 60 to under 30. Making house teams better also reduces pressure for kids to be on a road team. Travel teams, traditionally for the best players, are not for everyone — many people live in Traverse City because they like spending time here.

“Personally, I want the best for our boy. I want him to play for Central [High School], but I’m not going to Detroit every weekend,” Gollan said. “I’m not doing that. We love being here. We love what this place has to offer us as a family. So I looked at this and said, ‘What can I do to organize this for other families like that?’”