Great Opportunity!

Hi Guys,
You’ve made some great comments on the blog! Good stuff. We do have LOTS of talent on this team, and a great opportunity to do some great things this season. Let’s keep working hard.

I haven’t spoken to Coach Jim, but obviously he’s had some difficulty gathering the final two votes for captain and assistants. I’m certain he’s doing his very best to gather these two remaining votes and post the results. Hopefully we’ll have a tally by this afternoon.

Jordan, thank you for gathering and posting the stats. Let’s talk about maybe posting something in the right hand side of the blog, which will be there all the time.

We covered a lot of stuff last Saturday.

I hope you have all read – several times – our Excellence Creed. Your coaches firmly believe this is an integral part of our ultimate success.

We talked about intensity. Remember, our opposition gets NO SPACE and NO TIME! Always! Do you remember why we play with such intensity? Maybe someone could reply with the answer.

We also talked about the fact that the ball is OURS! As I mentioned above, ball hockey is a game of intensity. That’s especially critical during 1-on-1 battles for the ball. It’s critical that we win as many of those little battles during a game as possible. And when is a battle for the ball over? When does the 1-on-1 battle officially end? Again, maybe someone could reply with the answer.

And I should add a few notes about our game Saturday, and areas where we have opportunity to improve.

We had a few defensive breakdowns, both in our zone, and in the oppositions.

In our zone, the two defensemen and the centre must communicate and work together (with intensity :)) to ensure we are covering their men in front of our net. We left their guys all alone in front of our net too often. And remember, if you’re “covering” a guy, that means you’re touching him, constantly.

We also had some defensive breakdowns in their zone, leading to them bringing rushes down the floor that were 3-on-2, 2-on-1, and sometimes 1-on-our goalie. Wingers, if one of our defensemen is involved in a rush down into their zone, it is your job to hang back and take his place on the blue line, until he returns. The odd man rushes happened because we had four players deep and only one defenseman on the blue line.

The Condors clearly respected our scoring ability. In their zone they were intentionally and consistently playing four players deep, with only one of their wingers up at their blue line, covering our two defensemen. This system of sending both the centre and a winger deep into the zone to help the defensemen is something we will use the odd time as well. Teams use this when they want to outnumber the three forwards that are trying to score. Teams use that system when they have great respect for the opposition.

For now, I’ll get back to working on our systems. More to come...

Coach Steve