Coaching Coaches...

So, today was my second day of the coaching clinic that I was asked to give. I had 15-20 girls hockey coaches from the Harbin China area, varying in experience from 1-6 years of coaching. This was arranged by yet another different man named Mr. Wang. A tall slender older man, who was very nice and appreciative of me taking the time to help the girls hockey coaches in the area.

Today was a better day, as I had a better idea of what was expected of me. I spent a good 75 minutes on teaching the techniques of goaltending. I had asked ahead of time to have a goalie available to demonstrate. They had 15-17 year old boy who was a pretty good demonstrater as he had decent technique, but also made many of the common mistakes. After that I talked about using small games to teach hockey and how to build drills on top of each other to maximize understanding.

I finished by answering questions that they had had from the day before. Including some more on defensive coverage skills and drills (I did a little the first day), some more passing drills an passing and receiving techniques, and some further explanation on how to build angling technique drills into teaching forechecking.

For those of you with little hockey knowledge that may sound like "Chinese" to you, but they were very attentive and I got many thanks for my help with their coaching. When I return from Finland, we are talking about a one day a week classroom seminar on a different topic each week. There seems to be a lot of interest in that. Among the coaches were two former National team players who were on the best Chinese Olympic team ever, coming in 4th in Nagano in 1998.

This evening, Coach Ji invited Tim and I to have dinner with his family. We met his wife, daughter (15), nephew (10) and sister in-law. Also, the team captain, Wang Linou came out with us. We had a great time, some great food in the traditional round table private room style. His daughter is learning english in school and had a great time talking with Tim and I. Ji and Tim each had their translating dictionaries out and were having a contest of sorts where one would look through the book and ask the other a question in the other's language. Then the other would look up the answer and respond in the other language. Tim is starting to pick up Chinese faster than I have. Ji gave him only 10 days to learn all the player's names.


Time for bed as we begin again at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow! No daylight savings in China so I am now 13 hours ahead of the east coast ;-)