The Person Who Does the Work Does the Learning

On working and learning at the 2024 edition of Detroit Red Wings development camp

The person who does the work does the learning. This sentiment is a fundamental truth of any form of education, and athletic training is no exception. From that sentiment, a question begs for the world’s teachers and coaches: How do we make sure the right work is happening to maximize our efficiency in the limited time we have with which to impart a lesson?

Take 2024 Red Wings Development Camp as an example. As Detroit brass likes to say, the camp is meant to be educational and not evaluative. Camp is also only five days, which is reduced to three days of on-ice education by a preliminary day of testing and capstone day reserved for scrimmaging. The camp represents an extremely limited window of direct, face-to-face, collective opportunity to work with a group of 50 drafted and invited prospects for the organization, building in an imperative to make that time count.

Using examples of drills from Detroit’s camp so far, here are three fundamentals of sound practice design:

The best evaluator of any class, practice, or other sort of lesson—whether a graduate school symposium or U-8 soccer practice—is at any given moment in the session, what percentage of the class, team, or group is engaged in the lesson (i.e. doing the work, i.e. doing the learning)?

There is no worse way to run a practice than with one, two, or three kids taking a shot or fielding a ground ball or dribbling through a gauntlet while the other 15 kids just stand around and watch. Time is limited. Of course there is some real value in mental reps or watching teammates struggle with similar challenges and constraints, but remember our most guiding of principles: the person who does the work does the learning. It’s hard to do the work standing still.

There is absolutely a place for teaching technical skills in a non-game like environment. Getting that sort of foundation is a prerequisite for transferring that skill into a game environment. For example, in this clip, you can see skating coach Rebecca Babb leading a progression that is decidedly non-game-like. The idea here is to build a foundation, and doing so involves breaking down the skill in question (in this case the skating stride) to its component parts, thereby creating a fundamental separation from how it will look in a game.

However, ensuring that these technical skills eventually manifest as in-game habits requires a game-like environment. In the context of hockey, what does that actually look like? It means using real human beings to provide pressure (even token pressure) or reference points, rather than toys or obstacles. It means receiving the puck to start a drill as you might in a game, picking it up off the wall or taking it off a teammate and a coach, instead of simply beginning with it on your blade.

For any teacher or coach, it is easy to feel like a good lesson or practice is an organized one. In reality, learning is often messy, and to embrace chaos is to feed goals (1) and (2). When you maximize the number of players involved at any given moment, things are going to get messy. Players might run into one another. The faster pace of action might cause some confusion about what a particular drill is actually supposed to look like.

However, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, from a learning perspective that confusion should be embraced rather than mitigated. To maximize learning, you don’t want players following a neat script with an ocean of space in which to operate. Instead, messy, loud, frenetic conditions better mirror the environment players will confront in games, and confusion forces reads and reactions instead of rote roboticism.

Let’s look at two examples to sharpen our picture:

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKHJQ9X8DDM[/embed]

The drill we are looking at is a simple one. A forward sends a pass to the point for a shot from a defenseman with a deflection in front, then sends a second pass to the point for the same D, before rolling to the net for his own redirect.

What hopefully jumps out right away is that we have more players watching than participating. Some degree of that is an inevitable necessary evil, but to optimize a practice is to find a way to get that number well above 50%.

What also stands out is that the forward who commences the drill does so simply by selecting a puck and sending that pass. It is an utterly un-game-like way to pick up a puck, diminishing the utility of the exercise for the player in question. It could be improved by adding a defender to provide some measure of pressure, the idea being not to break up the play but for that defender to let the forward know what it will feel like to make this play with a checker on his back as he will have to in a game.

Then, we can see the only obstacle for the defenseman to contend with as a shooter is a stationary shot-blocking dummy. Here again, an actual human body could offer a much crisper simulation of game conditions. That body isn’t actually trying to break up the play, just offer a reference point for what it will look like to shoot that puck in for a deflection in a game, where there are no wooden cut-outs attempting to defend and dispossess you but rather people.

For a more positive example, consider the following:

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl3TS895SQg[/embed]

A far greater percentage of the group is engaged, and you can quite literally hear the difference in the sound of the whistle and the cutting of skate blades into the ice. As players work through this progression, they must navigate a far more chaotic environment than they did in drill one. There are bodies and pucks flying, and each player must navigate that chaos to succeed.

As far as picking up the puck goes, you can see forwards who must receive a rimmed pass along the yellow of the boards. 70% or more of an NHL hockey game is played along the boards. A player who is ill-equipped at cleanly picking up the puck off the wall is at a fundamental disadvantage to a peer who is proficient at this skill. This drill demands players hone that ability before even diving into the more chaotic middle third of the drill.

We have lots of bodies moving. We have game-like conditions. We have chaos. That’s a good sign we have learning too.