USA Hockey Adult Hockey

If you watched Jordan Spieth play a three-hole stretch at Augusta at 6-over par on Sunday, turning a Masters lead into a disaster for the ages, you might have thought: “Hey, even I could have done that!”

Emboldened with this new knowledge, maybe you even hit the course or driving range this past week to hit some fancy, professional-grade shots before realizing: “Wait, I can’t even hit my driver straight twice in a row.”

Translation: In every stage and endeavor of life, we must learn to walk before we can run. Translated into hockey terms, we must learn to skate – and skate well – before we can build other parts of our game.

To highlight that message, we talked to David Swenson, player and administrator of Minnesota’s Adult Hockey Association (AHAHockey.com), one of the largest adult hockey leagues in the United States with 165 teams in its winter program.

The AHA also offers a beginner school in the winter and spring, a 20-week program designed to take adult newbies from a mite level to a peewee level in a handful of months. At the core of the lesson plan? You guessed it. Skating.

Mastering the Basics

Some of the new players in the AHA beginner program are as raw as they could be.

“When we run our schools where we teach adults hockey, a lot of times players will come to the rink with skates in boxes not even knowing they need to have them sharpened ahead of time,” Swenson says. “We’re literally starting from scratch in a lot of areas.”

The most fundamental building block is learning how to skate properly. Even for players who are more advanced, building a better skating base is key.

“It’s the traditional bending the knees, good solid low center of gravity, inside edge work,” Swenson says of the method of teaching a beginner to skate. “We’ll pair them up. We don’t have them push chairs around or anything, but we’ll pair up and have them push their partner down the ice and vice-versa.”

Better athletes – those who engage in regular outside aerobic exercise such as biking, walking or running – have a higher chance to succeed because they have greater endurance and leg strength.

“It’s hard to take somebody who is putting on skates for the first time and make a peewee player out of them. A lot of that depends on their athletic ability to begin with,” Swenson says. “We do have people who pick it up and, by the end of 20 weeks and you never would have known they had never been on skates.

Why the Basics Matter

But there are also plenty of players who get a taste of skating and immediately want to start working on more complicated things.

“Of course,” Swenson says with a laugh. “That’s the fun part, right? There is a mental and physical aspect. Everyone wants to jump right into the one-timers, and they can’t handle that.”

There aren’t any magic solutions to becoming a better skater other than to work at it and put in the time, Swenson says, but the payoff is easy to see once you think about it.

“If you don’t win the race to the puck, you don’t have to worry about the one-timer,” he says. “You’re never going to have an opportunity to score if you and your teammates can’t win the race to the puck.”

Hockey 101

A lot of the participants in the AHA beginner school are either parents of kids starting out in hockey or young adults who want to join friends who are already playing league hockey.

In this case, forget the idea that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.

“The good news with adults is that their attention span is much greater (than kids) so they actually listen to the instructors,” Swenson says. “We’re pretty open with them. We work skating into every single session. By sessions 3-5, we’re into shooting and breakouts and things like that, but we still spend a fair amount of time in every practice working on skating.”

Swenson says they work on game situations and controlled scrimmages as part of the first 10 weeks of instruction.

“They’re excited and want to get going,” he says. “But they’re all adults and they understand it will take some work before they become proficient.”

After 10 weeks, though, they jump into real games – where newbie adults get an appreciation for just how hard the game is and just how important it is to master the little things before working on the big stuff.

“Of all the positions in our organization, the beginner school instructors have the most rewarding positions,” Swenson says. “They see the progress, literally. And the adults that ‘graduate’ from our school, they’re so appreciative of the opportunity. They come away with that greater respect for the skill level.”

Just like the weekend hacker appreciates just how good Spieth had to be just to be in the position he was in on Sunday.