Developing coaches vital part of China Games experience

BEIJING -- The 50 or so Chinese coaches sat in the second deck of stands at AZ Ice Sports Club, intently watching the Boston Bruins practicing on the ice below them.

Thirty minutes earlier they were introduced to Boston coach Bruce Cassidy, who stood in front of the coaches, here for a day-long symposium organized by the NHL on Monday, and used a whiteboard to break down the first three drills the Bruins were going to run during practice.
Now they were seeing the drills live.
For most it was their first taste of what a professional hockey practice looked like. It was yet another example of how the NHL is trying to build a hockey culture in China.
"You can't grow the game without coaching," former Ottawa Senators coach Paul MacLean said. "That's where we have to start."
MacLean is taking part in the
2018 O.R.G. NHL China Games
to help in that cause. Along with him is former NHL assistant Dan Lacroix and former NHL player and current NHL Network analyst Alex Tanguay. They ran a coaching symposium in Shenzhen on Friday and one here Monday.
The coaching symposium is new to the China Games, which began last year with two preseason games between the Los Angeles Kings and Vancouver Canucks and is continuing this year with the Bruins and Calgary Flames doing the same. The teams will play at Cadillac Arena in Beijing on Wednesday (7:30 a.m. ET; NBCSN, SN). The Bruins won 4-3 in a shootout at Universiade Sports Center in Shenzhen on Saturday.

To maximize its investment in growing the game in China, particularly at the grassroots level, the League feels the key to do that most effectively is to develop coaches.
"When we first started we were really focused on the player clinics, and what we realized was with the player clinic you're able to get to 25, 30, 40 kids. But with the coach's clinic you're able to get to a couple hundred kids, or thousands of kids, because these coaches can impart the right messaging and the right stuff that we do in the way we teach the game," NHL executive vice president of media and international strategies David Proper said. "I suspect that what we need is to continue to grow that coaching education. When we come and watch kids play, the talent level is there. So now it's about teaching them all the way up through the ranks how to continue to build on that."
Through a translator, MacLean, Lacroix and Tanguay made presentations on drills, how to teach proper shooting, passing and skating techniques, and how most effectively to work with kids to keep the game interesting and fun so they want to keep coming back on the ice.
They also broke into smaller groups for question-and-answer sessions.
"Getting to the players, if you don't know how to structure practice properly, it will be hard," Lacroix said. "I told the coaches you need to have a plan. You need to be the best prepared coach out there. You need to come in, have a plan, explain the plan, demonstrate it to your kids, let them do it and then you need to stop and correct it as may be so they can execute it in games. But that's a four- or five-step process in order to get it done right."

How much got through in translation is difficult to measure, but former NHL defenseman Doug Lynch, who has brought his business, DL Hockey Consulting, to China to help in the grassroots development of the sport and helped the NHL organize the symposium, said he thought it was a success because everyone was engaged and interested in the presentations.
"Take 20 years ago with the NBA, nobody here watched the NBA here before Yao Ming became a superstar," said Lynch, who played two games for the Edmonton Oilers during the 2003-04 season. "Well, how do you create a superstar? Coaching. We as a group, as a collective hockey culture, have to create the Yao Ming of Chinese hockey, so we have to coach and teach these coaches and give as much information as we can to help them grow the sport."
Lynch, who played the final seven seasons of his professional career in Europe (2007-14), has been developing and running his youth hockey program in China for two years.
He came to China at the request of a friend who ran a rink in Shenzhen and wanted to start a hockey program for his business. He said he arrived with a suitcase and his skates, went to public skates, got sticks in the hands of children, and in three months built a program of 80 kids.
But he said getting proper coaching for all the children interested in playing is one of the biggest challenges facing hockey in China.

"As a coach, I can only be on the ice a certain amount of time and I can only affect a certain amount of kids," Lynch said. "But if I can go train 10, 20, 50 or 100 coaches and they go and coach 100 kids each, now you can start to have a sustainable hockey program that can last for 20, 30, 40, 50 years."
Tanguay said he got on the ice with a group of children last week in Hong Kong and was impressed by the talent level, saying the 5- and 6-year-olds were as good as kids he's around that age in North America.
He said the next step is to use coaching to get the more talented players to buy into the team concept.
"In our game you have to pass the puck and play as a team to be successful," Tanguay said. "The coaching they have now, they're starting to get their kids to pass the puck, but it's tough in some instances to get the kid who can score eight goals in a game to get the parents to understand that he needs to pass the puck to get better, that if he wants to be part of a team he needs to pass."
That's why it's essential to the potential future success of hockey in China to develop coaches. If the symposiums are an indication, interest is high.
Lacroix particularly was impressed by some of the questions he got.

"Some were very technical questions, such as do you stop with two legs or one, stop with one leg when you defend in the 'D' zone," he said. "And someone else asked, 'Our players always skate with two hands on their stick, do you want them with one hand or two hands on their stick?' I tell them is it's all about quickness, so NHL players will stop with two legs as much as they can, and two hands or one hand (on the stick), it depends on the situation. I also gave them examples of good players that practiced picking up pucks with one hand to pick up more speed. (Connor) McDavid does it. (Steven) Stamkos does it. Marty St. Louis was always working on getting pucks on his forehand and backhand with one hand. Those are skills you can practice.
"They were interesting conversations and one way to move forward with teaching these kids is giving these coaches some of these details they need."
It's a process the NHL plans to continue as it puts more resources, including a potential satellite office here, into growing the sport in China.
"As I said at the coaches clinic [in Shenzhen], they're the key to this," NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said. "Having knowledgeable coaches who can teach the game is as important as anything else we're doing [in China]."