Hockey Masters

Tip of the Month -- JANUARY 2005 -- How To Avoid Burnout

How To Avoid Burnout

With travel schedules, and AAA intensity, it's no wonder kids (and their parents) experience burnout sometime during their young careers. Sometimes taking time off is the only solution, but for the parents involved it's painful to watch their child regress after putting so much time and enery into the sport.

How can a player take time off from hockey and get better at the same time?

After coaching youth athletes for more than 20 years, and parenting three "travel sport" children of my own, I can understand both the feelings of the player and their parents.

Problem: The schedules are grueling, more packed into one week than an average adult would even dream of, coupled with high academic expectations that can push a kid too hard too soon. But the parents have driven 20,000/year, emptied their checkbook, and sustained the emotional highs and lows involved, they hate to see all that time and effort "go to waste".

Solution: Involve your child in other activities that provide him/her with continued athletic development. Taking the spring or summer off to play baseball, soccer, study karate, or train for a charity run, are just a few of the types of activity that will continue to enhance your child's athletic skills. Unfortunately, the current reality of upper levels of competitive hockey is that it has become a year-round sport, and it involves an extremely specialized form of movement-SKATING!

A better solution is to make participation in hockey different. This is the method Hockey Masters uses to maximize a player's development. Hockey Masters offers summer programs where players engage in on-ice and off-ice development. The on-ice portion is different than anything they do all season because it is strictly skill oriented. Players are constantly moving the whole hour, no standing in lines; multiple skills are studied in one session, no more than 10-15 minutes on any one skill; skating is always the main emphasis.

The off-ice portion involves strengthening and conditioning through own-body-weight exercises, weight training, and boxing. Not only do players increase their strength, coordination, and agility, they gain confidence.

In my 23 years of coaching I have never witnessed the mental turn-around in a group of youth players the way I have over the past few summers. I could tell you that the players improve (they do), I could tell you they skate faster or their shot is harder, etc. But all of that pales by comparison to what happens to their attitude and confidence. I have heard countless stories from parents who tell me "my son always stood near the back of the line in practices, now he's first in line every time" or "the coach calls on Billy to demonstrate almost every drill now", and so on and so on. Some of the female players we have try out and MAKE their high school boys Varsity teams. The proof is in the pudding!

If this still sounds too intense for your child, the one other thing that I know kids love is for non-playing family members to start playing! No kidding! Moms, dads, siblings, cousins, you name it, every hockey player I've ever known LOVES teaching and playing with non-skaters. It brings the memories of being a kindergartener back, the memories of scoring their first goals, the memories of the hot chocolate machine in the lobby. These are the things that made your kid fall in love with the sport in the first place, it never hurts to revisit them. From a teenager's prospective, it also puts you on "their side". They want you to know how hard it is, they want you to physically appreciate what it is they do, they want to share their hockey knowledge with you one-on-one, they want your continued admiration. So lace up those rental skates and go play!

The irony of "different" hockey training is that not only do the players improve, but they forget all about being "burned out" because hockey becomes FUN AGAIN. Any 13 or 14 year old kid who's been playing hockey for 7 or 8 years may be tired of it, but they still LOVE IT. The trick, as a parent, is to find ways to rekindle the passion that brought them were they are today. Who knows, maybe they'll have to drive you to your first league game!