Youth vs Experience: The Team Canada Olympic Hockey Model

Every team has trouble deciding exactly how to integrate youth into their line-up without taking away time from their proven veterans. When watching the Team Canada Mens Hockey team last year at the olympic i came up with a model as how to do this.

Now before we continue we are running under the assumption that your team has run tryouts so that the youth on your team have earned the right to be on your team.

Thesis: Youth will get you to big moment, Experience will make sure you capture it

The best example of the youth getting them to the finals were defenders Drew Doughty and Duncan Keith. In the Preliminary stages of the tournament and the pre-quarters, quarters, semis. Doughty and Keith were the standout defensemen for the Canadians. Throughout the tournament elder Statesmen Chris Pronger was drawing criticism from many for his sloppy defensive play and at times idiotic penalties. Yet come the Gold Medal match, Pronger and team Captain and oldest defensemen Scott Niedermeyer, were the top players on defense for Canada. The experience that these two players brought allowed them to excel in the big game

How this applies to ultimate.

Early in games and tournaments allow your youth time to play and make plays. Youth brings energy, exuberance and a desire to prove that they deserve playing time. Late in tournaments, late in games, go with the players that have been there and wont be bothered by the big moment. That is , if they are still able to perform at their best. Go with experience, but dont cut your youth out altogether, give them chances to still make plays and prove themselves, but lean more towards experience.

The Intangibles

There are things in sports that are easy to measure. Speed, vertical, height, weight etc... However when you make it to the top levels everyone is going to have roughly comparable stats. So where do teams gain the edge? There are intangibles that push a team over the edge.

Things like game preparation, figuring out match-ups and strategy are important but there are two things that I feel like will put a team over the edge: conditioning, and my personal favorite, heart.

Conditioning became an overwhelming favorite of mine when my team made the finals of the Canadian University Ultimate Championships in 2009. The team we were playing in the finals we had beaten the day before by a safe margin. Although I still think it is safe to say that either team could beat the other on any day. But that day in the finals their superior conditioning showed as I personally found myself getting worked over on defence. It is unfortunate that it took such a big loss to drive home how important conditioning is, but I now put conditioning above almost any strength training during a season. Conditioning during practice time is also important. Some may feel that practice time should be used for strategy and working on chemistry, but to them I say...

having your team bust their ass running sprints and doing burpees builds a different kind of chemistry and adds to the heart of the team. The famous Roman army used to preach incestuous relations within their armies with the theory that you were more likely to fight harder for the man fighting beside you if he was your lover. Now scale that down a ton and get to my theory, you are more likely to work harder on the field for the guys who you have seen trying as hard as they can at practice working to make your team better. This builds the heart of a team when you are willing to lay it out on defence because you know that every other guy on your team would do the same. My University team this year, worked hard in practice every time, doing conditioning at every practice. So when our team was faced with some bad injuries to the top end we were able to overcome these by having faith in the other guys on our team who had worked just as hard and earned the right to play in big games. The heart of our team was the biggest of my four years at Western and we surprised some teams with how hard we worked every single point. Willing to grind it out whereas in the past we had been a little more finesse.

There is no stat for heart on a team, but i think you can generally tell how much heart a team has by how successful they are.

Quicksand

The majority of Canadian sports fans no doubt watched the unfortunate third period collapse of team Canada in the World Jrs finals. A team that had been playing dominant hockey from the semis up until half way through the second period of the finals just seemed to hit a snag. The idea of quicksand. No i'll admit i stole this term from the movie The Replacements with Keanu Reaves. But it basically goes like so...

One thing goes wrong, then another. Next thing you know you're in trouble. But the more you struggle and fight the further you sink until you cant breath (metaphorically).

This is my theory as to what happened to Team Canada. It is very common for younger players to fall to this. Generally the best way to overcome this mentality is to simplify your game into very basic stuff. Slow things down a bit and take them as they come.

This past friday I was at the Torontula/GOAT University Indoor tournament. There were multiple times i saw teams get struck by quicksand. Leading to drops and multiple throwaways. Which in speedpoint ultimate can burn you really fast. My team faced this problem in our last game, going down 8 points very early. At half-time we talked about just running hard and playing hard defence and slowly chipping away the other teams lead. We weren't going to overcome the 8 points in one minute it was going to be a process. But by simplifying our thoughts to running hard and defence we were able to bring it back to a tie game and only ended up losing by two.

I cant explain how many times teams build a lead and lose it from getting away from their game. And then they panic and next thing they know their lead is gone. Or a team comes out with nerves and give up an early lead and things get out of hand because they are forced to change their game plan. People will try to do too much in hopes that one big play will get them back. But this usually causes more harm than good as these plays dont always connect and your team is then in a bigger rut. I find simplifying and slowing down is generally what leads to maintaing ur shrinking lead, or getting back into a game you are behind in.

Off-Season Training

Anyone who wants to feel like getting in the gym and doing work go watch the movie "The Fighter" with Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. Also i feel like the nike boom commercials i have been seeing during the World Jr.s make training seem awesome and glorify it.

I have never been a huge fan of off-season training as i used to see my off-season as OFF-season. But after having a couple of seasons interrupted by injury or ended by injury altogether i now realize the importance of having your body strong enough to endure the rigours you put it through during an ultimate season. I feel like most ultimate players can sympathize with me and my hamstring issues, as hamstrings seems to be the most common injury i have heard of (knees are up there too).

So this year i am putting in a more conscious effort to strengthen my legs and ensure that come the "boom" moment that the nike ad's talk about, im able to preform and be on the field, healthy.

Indoor Season

Indoor season starts tonight, looking forward to throwing a frisbee again.

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