Summer Intro Letter
February 2010
To: All A.Y.H.A. Players, Families, and Coaches
As another hockey season nearly passes us by, I want to take a moment to share with everyone some opportunities I think we all will greatly appreciate. We all share the same vision, in that we want to provide our children with the best opportunities to help them learn, grow and develop into fine adults.
Part of child development is participating in sports. I have always said, “What goes on in the locker room, you can’t teach in the classroom,” i.e. leadership, teamwork, sportsmanship, understanding the benefits of winning and losing, structure and commitment to the team.
Since the day my family built and donated the Howard G. Mullett Ice Center, we have made great strides as a rink and organization to help provide that avenue to any child in our community. Over the course of 11 years as a high school and youth hockey coach – and as a father of two rambunctious Mite players – I have recognized that skill development is the key element to any youth hockey program. The lack of skill development is not just a problem in our organization, it is across the country. The question is what are we going to do about it? This awareness has resulted in opportunities!!
- First, after Marv Bednar’s retirement as Rink Manager, we started thinking about the best use of Mullett Center resources for youth hockey development.
Result: We hired Mike Watt as Director of Programs & Activities. Mike, with his experience from the NHL and Europe, comes to the organization as a resource to everyone involved in hockey.
- Second,we changed the practice-to-game ratio to 3 to 1.
Result: Thanks to Matt MacLean and the AYHA Coaches Committee, this change was implemented at the beginning of the 2009-10 season. We have a ways to go, but we are off and running in the right direction.
- Third, we are taking steps to provide every player in the organization with the opportunity to get more learning time to develop the right skills.
Result: The Summer Program that is being presented to you today! This program comes with a $4,000 charitable contribution from the Mullett family to support the organization in its commitment to skill development!
- And lastly, the Mullett Center Board would like to assist in the process of ensuring coaches have easy access to all the tools necessary to maximize their effectiveness when teaching the skills to every player in the organization.
Result: The Mullett Center will host its first-ever coaching seminar coming this September, followed by periodic coaching clinics throughout the season. This will be an open forum for coaches to share thoughts, ideas, opportunities and concerns. The Mullett Center will work with AHS and AYHA coaching staffs to produce coaching binders for every level of play. In September, every coach will receive a coaching binder for the level they wish to coach.
The binder will contain:
- Handouts from USA Hockey and other sources that coaches can use to help educate parents on hockey essentials.
- A review of level-specific skill development goals, with drills and tips to help teach these skills
- what it means to be an effective coach like leadership, life lessons, teamwork, sportsmanship, what you learn from winning and losing, tournament and game day preparation individual goals and team goals.
- Other aspects in the binder will cover basic forecheck, positional play, d-zone coverage, face-offs, breakouts, power play and penalty kill.
We want to be a resource for sharing coaching thoughts and experiences so everyone will be on the same page: we will walk away with a uniform, consistent message across the organization.
(Be sure to ask your coach next season if they went to the seminar.)
Have fun and see you on the ice!!
Coach Mullett
