I put up my hand to be a hockey coach, because there would be professional coaches helping out with practices. Most of what I know, I learned from the sidelines of watching house league and through osmosis as a Canadian.

If we didn't have professional coaches, I wouldn't have volunteered. So, I suspect that I'm part of the target market for this addition. They ran the practices for 2.5 months, from the start of the season until Christmas. I was hoping that I would learn how to do on-ice coaching from the professionals.

Since this is a bit of a single-perspective retrospective, I'll use a “happy, confused, sad” format.

Happy

• I liked having the professional coaches. I could count on them being there every Saturday.
• There was a strong emphasis on skills, which was appropriate for the beginning of the year and lower skill players.
• The drills were generally good and the coaches were competent. They demonstrated the drills well, gave good feedback, and was patient with the kids.
• The kids improved. It was cool to watch the kids get better over multiple iterations within a single session.

Confused

• I'm not sure what was the intention behind having professional coaches. My impression was it was supposed to be a train-the-trainer model, but that's not what happened.
• Professional coaching was probably expensive. How did we decide that his was a better way to spend money than paying for a subscription to online resources or a course? Some examples that would have been helpful are CoachThem (used by the Select team) or a course.
• I'm not sure if this format led to low attendance by Select players. They may have felt it was too basic and the practices couldn't complete with their other obligations. Or maybe the Select players wouldn't have come anyways. It's hard to know. But it probably would have been good to have drills that could be adapted to different skill levels.
• At practice, we share the ice with another team. After a few weeks, the coaches on the other team ran some drills in parallel with the professional coaches. For example, during the skating portion, the volunteer coach did more basic drills in one lane. Eventually, they stopped using the professional coaches altogether. I'm not sure why this happened. Was it because they thought the professional coaches were not doing a good job? Or that they couldn't ask for something different?

Sad

• I would have liked to receive more coaching from them as a coach. I was hoping to have learned more about how to create a practice plan, how to read a drill, how to choose a drill, and what to look for to give feedback.
• I would have liked to receive the practice plans in advance on “paper.” These would be a valuable resource for me now.
• I would have liked more consistency in coaching. Some professional coaches involved the volunteer parents by setting up stations. Others did not use stations, which resulted in kids standing around waiting their turn too much.
• I would have liked more continuity in the coaching. We had a lot of different coaches. Part of the reason is we have three different time slots at two arenas. Coaches were assigned to time and places, but the teams moved around. But also, we had substitute occasionally.
• I would have liked more team tactics. We didn't have many drills on how to work together as a team. To give a simple example, how to take a face off. Consequently, we didn't start this until January, which was very late.

The bottom line is I'm glad we had the coaches. I wouldn't be a coach without them. There was a lot of potential for positive impact. The potential was realized for the players, but less so for the coaches.