Progressive Hockey Development
Why Skills Lessons with Progressive Hockey Development?
Yes, hockey season is hectic. Practices twice per week and at least two games each weekend. The travel plus the amount of events each week can be overwhelming to hockey families and don’t forget the cost. All this and then some families add middle school or high school practices on top of it. While there are plenty of reasons to justify not getting outside coaching and additional ice time, there are also many, many reasons to do skills lessons in addition to your regular schedule.
INDIVIDUAL ATTENTION
At practices, coaches are running the drills, explaining the drills, keeping the tempo of the practice, and focusing on overall team strategy and tactics. With all of this, coaches often do not have the time to focus on the individual skills of each player. For this reason, players need additional work and coaching to learn, to improve, and to maintain skills.
KIDS NEED MORE ICE TIME
Most teams practice twice per week for 1.5 hours per practice, so 3 hours per week. For the normal 22 week season, that is only 66 hours of ice from September through February. That is about one week at work for most of us! That is NOT a lot of ice time. Lately, there have been article circulating about kids playing too much and getting overuse injuries. When I consider how much I played growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I laugh at that notion. Kids of my generation played way more and they played way more hockey. It didn’t matter if it was street hockey, roller hockey, or pond hockey, we played hockey all the time and for many, many hours at a time. If your child wants to be good at hockey, he and she need to get a lot more ice time!
LEARN FROM EXPERIENCE
Skills coaches can expedite development by teaching new tricks and providing expert analysis. Skills coaches know how to develop players’ skills from the ground up. They can also pick out little details that are needed to perfect a skill. These coaching abilities are often not found in parent coaches who never played or coached at high levels.
At the new Loudoun Ice Centre, players can do skills training with Progressive Hockey Development during prime time evening hours from 4:00pm to 8:00pm! Plus, Loudoun Ice has two 75” flat screen televisions to show instant video clips of each player to immediately provide constructive feedback. Darren Hersh is PHD’s Head Player’s Skills Coach and he offers over 40 years of playing and coaching experience. Hersh is a Level 5 USA Hockey Master Level Coach, who has played and coached at all levels of hockey from youth to high school and prep school and junior to college, to professional.
Your schedules are very busy. But in all honesty, to become better hockey players, kids need more ice time than they are currently getting. Loudoun Ice Centre and Progressive Hockey Development are the perfect venue and training organizations to help your players reach their goals.
The better your player is at hockey, the more fun they’ll have playing!