Comments (3)

By Jeremy Weiss, August 27, 2009 5:53 pm

One of those nice little hockey backchecking drills for your players. As always, click here for the drill printout.

Comments (0)

By Jeremy Weiss, August 14, 2009 8:51 pm

Just a quick report on today’s sessions…

Interesting day today at the Level 5 Clinic here in Minnesota. We heard from a bunch of pretty good hockey guys including Todd Richards (head coach of the Wild), Mike Sullivan (assistant coach of the Lightning), Mark Johnson (member of 1980 “Miracle” team and Head Coach of Wisconsin’s women’s team), Bryan Trottier (NHL Hall of Famer), and a panel of players from the 1980 American Miracle team.

One of the things I found interesting was Mike Sullivan’s take on defensive hockey (playing when the other team has the puck). He likes a very aggressive style when his team doesn’t have the puck, and showed us a few examples of his 1-2-2 forecheck that looked almost identical to our 1-2-2 Fooseball Forecheck. So – apparently it works in the NHL too

THEN – he showed an example of his neutral zone attack… and guess what? it was just a neutral zone version of the 1-2-2 fooseball! First man pressured outside in, second two took away the outlet passes.

Anyways – the main key that made this forecheck so effective in the clips was that the F1 was EXTREMELY aggressive, and F2 and F3 were REALLY fast to seal off the passing lanes.

So – that’s my report for today. Until next time!

Comments (0)

By Jeremy Weiss, August 13, 2009 8:09 pm

Hey guys – sorry for such a long gap between posts! I’ve been really busy this summer running hockey camps, going to family reunions, and a bunch of other stuff…

Anyways, right now I’m at the Level 5 Coaching Clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota. So far it’s been a pretty good event – we’ve heard from a bunch of cool speakers. But the most interesting thing I heard today as about COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT… or in other words BRAIN TRAINING.

There is a company called Applied Cognitive Engineering that has developed a product called IntelliGym that consists of a complex series algorithms that can be implemented into a video game that will train your brain to react quicker to the recurring patterns in athletics. They have already developed it for basketball, and are currently designing a hockey version.

Evidently, this is the same technology the Israeli Air Force uses to train their fighter pilots… it’s kinda like a flight simulator, only it’s totally different… I know that doesn’t make much sense, but it’s hard to describe. Basically, they’ve implemented hockey patterns into a video game that has nothing to do with hockey… (the example they showed us was a little space ship fighting game – but the space ships moved in hockey patterns). So your brain is being trained to react more instinctively instead of intellectually, and your reaction times improve.

With the Air Force pilots, they saw a 20-40% improvement across the board… the basketball players showed similar results, and hockey is expected to do the same!

The players’ decision-making skills can be tracked, and improvement within the game can be monitored. The game gets harder and faster as the player improves…Like I said – this stuff is REALLY cool. I thought I’d share the link so you can check it out for yourselves.

http://hockey.intelligym.com/

I’ll keep you posted on what I learn tomorrow… ENJOY!