Looking at the landscape of youth hockey in Washington state, Marty Rubin said there’s a lot of work to do when it comes to player development. 

That work starts with how coaches approach educating their players, and their parents, on and off the ice. Therefore, the PNAHA (Pacific Northwest Amateur Hockey Association) decided to host a Player Development Summit.

Rubin, PNAHA’s director of player development, said that the purpose of this initial Player Development Summit was to create a time to share and learn simple approaches for coaching and player development. 

“This is a first attempt for us to create more community and collaboration between associations through the medium of coaching development,” Rubin said.

The PNAHA Player Development Summit was a condensed conference for hockey directors and coaches within PNAHA and provided an opportunity to learn about player development strategies. The event, held Aug. 5-6 in Mountlake Terrace and Lynnwood, Washington, was free for coaches to attend 

Barry Smith, seven-time Stanley Cup champion assistant coach with Pittsburgh, Detroit and Chicago, was a keynote speaker along with Topher Scott, founder of the Hockey Think Tank, former assistant coach at Cornell University and former director of hockey operations at the University of Michigan.

Coaches were invited from all 16 PNAHA organizations, with a dozen of those organizations having a presence at the summit. About 80 people participated, from coaches to hockey association directors. Participation in the event counted toward three continuing education credits for Level 4 and Level 5 coaches from the area, which was about half the group.

Many coaches resonated with the on-ice practice demonstration during the summit. Smith was on the ice with a few coaches while the rest watched from the stands as they ran through a practice with a group of 14U players from the Seattle area.

“Coaches were taking a ton away from how to start simple and then scale appropriately for their group,” Rubin said. “Then I think other coaches, coaches of older players, from hearing from Topher were really encouraged about how to create buy-in and culture with their teams.”

Smith’s keynote thesis was replicating today’s game at practice using a strong understanding of three key parts of each game: When your team has puck possession (25%), when the opponent has puck possession (25%) and when nobody has puck possession (50%).

“It you’re going to improve, you better understand what are the main moments of the game, so we can practice those moments,” Smith said.

Smith laid out ways for coaches to make the best use of their practice time to help improve game performance. He said there aren’t many people teaching situational awareness because it’s hard to teach.

“I tried to walk them through the steps or the progressions to try to improve your ability to read and react in the game,” Smith said. “Then your elite teams, or your elite players, it’s not just that they have the ability to read and react, it’s speed of the processing that they do, and also the execution of the fundamentals.”   

“Barry works really well to be concise and simple in his approach to the economics of player development in the youth game,” Rubin added. “Then Topher coming from a completely different perspective, reversed engineering what a finished hockey product would look like if we’re talking about an NCAA Division I player or an NHL player.”

Smith added that these coaches don’t have to change their drills. They can take them and add some read/react to them so it becomes more about game replication.

Scott discussed the six Cs of hockey development: charisma, creativity, confidence, competitiveness, coachability and community. The two keynote speakers “simplified the paradigm of create and replicate,” Rubin said.

Hockey coaches left the summit taking away a great set of practice habits, and higher level Tier II coaches could take a more nuanced approach to create an environment for their players to learn and grow. Hockey directors who attended the summit can create player development strategy for their coaches.

“I think that we’re going to make a ton of impact early this season with every age division — boys, girls, every skill level in our state,” Rubin said.

Folks on the PNAHA player development committee also held a roundtable regarding topics specific to player development within PNAHA. Topics/questions included: “What’s the purpose of 10U half-ice hockey? Should PNAHA coaches be focused on development or winning? What is Tier I hockey? Does a player have to play Tier I to move onto the next level?”

“Very different perspectives and opinions and areas of expertise got to have that discussion live in front of our coaches,” Rubin said. “I think that was a really profound and eye-opening moment for coaches who maybe thought PNAHA hockey was this one thing or USA Hockey was this one thing.”

There are multiple pathways and programs across the state that are doing what they can to make each other better, Rubin added.

This was the first PNAHA Player Development Summit, although Rubin heard plenty of interest from attendees who would like this to turn into a biannual event. He even heard from people who couldn’t attend this event and spoke to him “with a lot of FOMO.”

They’re planning to add audio files from the summit to the PNAHA website, so those who couldn’t make the event can listen to the information.

“I think this is going to make a ton of impact on the game in our state,” Rubin said. “We need to keep building on it. This is just the beginning.”

Story from Red Line Editorial, Inc.