Happy New Year fam! The boys are on holiday break, so we have a rerun of one of our most popular Short Shifts for you guys!
On today's SHORT SHIFTS episode, Toph wants to talk about consistency. What players, and coaches, can do individually (with preparation, routines, habits) to help with team consistency.
TEN MINUTES ON THE CLOCK STARTING NOW!
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(upbeat music) - What's up everybody? We are back with another short shifts episode, 10 minutes are on the clock. Jeffrey LaVecchio has no idea what the topic is gonna be today. I'm really excited about this topic actually, Vex. 'Cause really relevant. You ready? You're looking at me when you say that. Does it have to do with modeling? (laughing) - It does. - Not. - Not. - Not. The dress is black, not. (laughing) Borat, love you. Okay, so today's topic, 10 minutes on the clock. You have no idea what I'm about to say. The topic of today is how to find consistency within a team. So, a lot of times, go to a tournament. Game one, really good. Game two, not so much. Game two, not very good. Game one, better. And it goes up and down and up and down and up and down. How do you find consistency in play as a team? - We're talking about younger teams. - We're talking about, for the most part. - We're talking about, yeah, below juniors. - Sure. - Or, I mean, I think it's all relative, but. - I would say, well, I think at the older ages, it's up to you to like know what you need to do to be your best, right? I think at the younger ages, it should be a lot more coached on the importance of organization of your day. The importance of, you know, the importance, but how routines can help you and learning those kind of things. So, I think that teaching the value of, okay, you know, if we play at such and such time and everyone has to be at the rink, whatever your team rule is, 90 minutes before, we have to be at the rink 90 minutes before, or an hour before, whatever you decide. We're gonna have a meeting 10 minutes after that. So 50 minutes before game time, we're gonna have a meeting. And then we're gonna do, give you 10 minutes to tape your sticks and get your equipment all ready. And then we're gonna do a warmup, you know, 40 minutes before, 30 minutes before. And then from there, it's doing that every single game because I think that when you're younger, a lot of players are inconsistent because their preparation is inconsistent. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's a learning process. So I think when we're talking about younger players and we're talking about, you know, consistently performing to the best of their abilities, something that's massively important is teaching them the value and making them practice. Routine, organization, preparation, you know, all those little buzzwords that actually do really mean a lot. So like, I think that you can come up with kind of a plan, a daily plan, you know, game plan, okay? When you get to the rink, boom, then we're meeting, boom. Then you get time to tape your stick, your equipment ready, boom, check it. Young players for the love of God, get your steal at least 30 minutes before the game to make sure that you have an edge, you didn't, you know. - No, before that, like the day before. - You need to be checking that stuff, right? And like just kind of like a checklist and then holding your team accountable to hitting everything on the checklist because, and we don't want to create robots by no means do we want that or superstitious weirdos. There's a difference between organization routine and superstition. So, you know, just kind of coaching people through that. And the biggest thing is that if you prepare the same way every time, you're pretty much gonna know how you're gonna feel from your preparation. That's why I'm such a massive proponent of doing things the way that I do things and the way that I teach things is because I want to take out that uncontrolled variable. I want to control the variables of what your energy expenditures are when you're eating, your mindset, your routine. You don't really got to think then. You just know, okay, I'm gonna do bop, bop, bop, bop. And then you know how that stuff's gonna make you feel leading into the game. - Yeah, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. Don't forget that last. - I was gonna say, make sure that last bop is you don't get that last bop, you're not consistent. - Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, I totally agree. Consistency in preparation equals consistency in play. And so you can't expect to just snap your fingers or turn a light switch on on Friday and Saturday. If you haven't done the necessary work to create the best habits, Monday through Thursday. And I've probably mentioned this before, but I remember having a conversation with Reed Cashman who is a head coach at Dartmouth now. He was at Quinnipiac at the time. And Cash was like, my job is Monday to Thursday. My job is to instill the habits necessary in my players Monday through Thursday so they can go out and just do what they love to do on Friday and Saturday nights. And I thought that was so profound. I thought that was so true, right? Like we kinda undercoach during the week and we overcoach on the weekend. (laughs) We think our job as coaches sometimes is coaching the games, but in reality, like a majority of our job is done in training sessions. And so to start with that, if we're expecting our players to be consistent in our preparation, we sure as hell be consistent with our preparation as coaches. Woo! Because a lot of times coaches scapegoat the players for not being consistent. Look in the mirror first. If you don't have a practice plan every day, if you don't have a good pre-practice routine, if you don't have a good routine yourself, then you're a hypocrite. If you're getting really upset with the players for not being consistent, right? And how many coaches have you played for? I've certainly played for a few who it was always your fault as players. (laughs) Yep. You know, some of the best coaches that I've played for, the first thing that they do, when they come in when you're having a tough go, like a tough go, is they take accountability for it. Hey, I didn't have a great week in preparing you guys. I could've been better and I'm sorry, but we as a collective group need to be better as well, type stuff. Dude, I said it in the gym yesterday at TPH, who I work with three times a week to train during the season this year. I had the kids, the youngest group do a pogo drill, which is a type of miniature jump for layman's out there. And I threw in this extra wrinkle just to kind of challenge your brains and none of them did it the way I wanted. And I immediately stopped and I said, "Guys, it's not what I wanted, "but you all did it wrong," which means I coached it wrong. Not your fault, completely my fault. Let me try coaching it this way. Let's see how this goes. And I'm not pumping my own tires. What I'm saying is what Toph just said is so massively important that I think a lot of coaches, a lot of coaches, they point the finger at the team and it's like, well, it's like in school, if you're in biology class and the entire class fails a test, something's wrong. Either your questions weren't on the study guide or you didn't teach the material well enough or you haven't captivated the audience so that they're receptive to learning. If the whole class failed, you need to look in the mirror teach and it's the same thing as a coach. If they're not playing consistently or they're not playing well often, you need to look in the mirror and guys, it's so true. In a game, you don't wanna be thinking slowly. You wanna react, you wanna play, you wanna bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. All your thoughts are very quick and concise and you can act on them within a split second. So what Toph was saying there is like, the coach's job is during the week is to instill all the different habits and thought processes and practice habits and details and all these things so that come game time, there's no thinking and they just react and it just bang second nature. You coach during the week and then they do whatever you guys worked on on the weekend. You need to think about that. - Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And as coach is like, if you're a college hockey fan or particularly if you're a Michigan hockey fan, you know that last year we were very inconsistent at certain points during kind of like the middle of the year. We were losing on Friday nights and not playing very well and then boom, like Saturday nights we were getting or going. And you know, like we started to focus on the things that we can control, focus on the process. Like if you yourself and you're teaching your players to focus on the controllables, that's what we're talking about here because when you focus on the controllables and you set goals and you set accountability structures of the things that you can do to become better individually and as a team, that at the end of the day leads to consistency in your preparation which will lead to consistency in your play. And so not focusing on the opponent that you're playing so much, focusing on your game plan, focusing on what you do really well as a team and focusing on your especially identity. Talk about it, like if you're inconsistent, it's because you don't, a lot of times you don't have a clear and established identity that your team needs to play to. Identity is everything in hockey, in sports, in business, you know, in everything. Like you have to have a clearly defined identity of who you are, who we are and how we do things, focusing on the things that are in your control. And so where, you know, and at the higher levels of hockey, every year, there is a check where coaches get in a room and we're like, we're probably focusing too much on the opponent and not enough on ourselves. And when you focus on your identity and you lead with that stuff, like that's so big with what we're talking about right now. - Massive, I mean, I don't feel like we're almost there. - We have 15 seconds left. - 15 seconds. - We got anything else to add, consistency. - Why not your damn identity and then stick to it? - I like it. So in a nutshell, Jeff LeVacchio. - Share the show. - Share the show. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
