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MThockeydad

Starting an Adult Beginner League: Politics

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We started two weeks ago.

So far, we've avoided rink/association politics and have involved 17 really fun people--7 gals and 10 guys.

Thanks to everyone who posted reminding me to review and repeat everything. One of my fellow instructors did a learn-to-skate program in Minneapolis four years ago and he's been a HUGE asset.

We had the never-evers and we had a few people who have skated before but couldn't stop reliably. We've focused on basic skating for everyone, and started teaching snowplow stops and 1-footed stops.

They're doing awesome and we had 10min cross-ice scrimmages that were the highlight of their night.

I had them self-segregate into "I feel comfortable skating faster and stopping reliably" and "I don't like to skate fast and am still worried about stopping". Both games were a ton of fun. The slightly more skilled group looked like a bunch of overgrown squirts!

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Long-overdue update: 5 of those rookies played C league last fall, we got compliments on their skills and preparation.  4 of the women went into the women's league.

 

I was busy managing and assistant coaching the local 14U girls team last season and handed the rookie program off to my friend who assisted me the first season.  He had 10 all female rookie skaters last year.  No guys participated.

 

Big news: local adult hockey association picked up our program and will help promote it.  They've seen too many beginner skaters in C league who don't know how to stop or turn, nor understand the rules of the game nor positioning.  Enough people have complained that the never-evers will be encouraged to go through.  Another friend of mine got on the adult hockey board and sold it from within.  They also picked up the women's league she used to manage independently.

 

 

As for my local association politics, the biggest detractors have moved on, and we've got some great new blood on the board (including two of those rookies from two seasons ago--one is a current hockey parent, the other's daughter graduated two years ago but is still in adult hockey).  

The oversight of the rookie program by the adult association is also seen as a good thing by the rest of our youth hockey association who owns the rink.

 

I'm pretty excited.  Not only are we building more hockey players, we're involving people who get involved and give back to our hockey community.

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Howdy,

Awesome!

As someone who started a year ago, I've been lucky that there are Adult skills classes & beginner leagues near my area.  Around here, the beginner leagues are called E league.  :-)  I'm now playing on two different D league teams and continue to play with the E league group.  For me at least, having those adult skills classes and beginner leagues were a huge help in getting started.

I really like the skills classes as well.  It seems like a lot of people only want to play games / scrimmages, where I'm at least as interested in practice... I feel like I learn a lot more about how to play in a practice setting where there's "nothing on the line" and I'm not going to let teammates down if I'm trying stuff new to me.  What would be even better would be to find a team that wants to do practice and games both... It would be like going back to high school sports.  :-)

Good for you for getting it going in your area!

Mark

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On 9/17/2016 at 8:34 AM, marka said:

As someone who started a year ago, I've been lucky that there are Adult skills classes & beginner leagues near my area.  Around here, the beginner leagues are called E league.  :-)  I'm now playing on two different D league teams and continue to play with the E league group.  For me at least, having those adult skills classes and beginner leagues were a huge help in getting started.


I really like the skills classes as well.  It seems like a lot of people only want to play games / scrimmages, where I'm at least as interested in practice... I feel like I learn a lot more about how to play in a practice setting where there's "nothing on the line" and I'm not going to let teammates down if I'm trying stuff new to me.  What would be even better would be to find a team that wants to do practice and games both... It would be like going back to high school sports.  :-)

Good for you for getting it going in your area!

Mark

Yep.  I was also fortunate to start in an adult skills class and then a weekly dropin session with better skaters who were beginner-friendly.  Those schedules changed (cancelled) so we're paying it forward to the next crop of beginners.

Our area has A, B+, B, C, so similar tiers to you.  I just moved up from C to B last spring...but volunteered to be a C draft captain if any of these rookies end up playing in the spring session so I can play with them.

 

On 6/25/2014 at 10:36 AM, chippa13 said:

Just make sure those guest coaches understand that teaching adults can be very different from teaching kids.

Having coached both kids and adults, I enjoy the challenge of coaching kids, but adults are MUCH easier to coach.  They pay attention, the ones who want to learn skills have reasonably good self-feedback mechanisms in place, and they're very tolerant of pauses while you gather your thoughts, they catch your breath.
Coaching kids, you need to keep things rolling like a Nickelodeon TV producer and constantly give them positive reinforcement and repeat yourself a million times...and only when they finally figure it out they think they did it themselves!  haha

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