Player development: how the federations plan a hockey career.

Hockey Canada's plan is called Long Term Player Development (LTPD); USA Hockey's is the American Development Model (ADM). Both come out of the long-term athlete development approach. Hockey Canada's LTPD manual (Version 2, 30 March 2013) calls itself the hockey-specific response to Sport Canada's Long-Term Athlete Development model, Canadian Sport for Life, and names Richard Way and Istvan Balyi among its contributors.

Hockey Canada's LTPD stages

The 2013 manual is not consistent about the count. One page calls it an eight-stage model, three physical-literacy stages and five development stages, while its table of contents and a later page say nine. A summary of Hockey Canada's current LTPD page for players also describes nine stages, the first four focused on physical literacy.

The manual's main points:

• Late specialisation. Hockey Canada calls hockey a late-specialisation sport. It says specialising before age 10 risks one-sided preparation, missing basic movement skills, overuse injuries, early burnout and early retirement, and advises parents not to fix a child to one position, focus only on hockey or play year-round.
• Physical literacy before the growth spurt, built through basic movement skills on the ground, in water, in the air and on ice.
• Windows. Learn to Play opens the most important window for fine motor skills before the growth spurt; Learn to Train is the most significant period for development, a window of accelerated motor-coordination adaptation. Train to Train builds an aerobic base, speed and strength, consolidates hockey skills, cuts the number of other sports and introduces individual and group tactics.
• Three kinds of age. The manual separates chronological, developmental and training age. Early maturers have an advantage in Train to Train, but later maturers often have more potential once everyone has passed the growth spurt.
• Training windows by sex. Using the "5 S's" (stamina, strength, speed, skill, suppleness, after Dick, 1985), the manual places the strength window for girls immediately after peak height velocity (PHV) or at the start of menstruation, and for boys 12 to 18 months after PHV. It gives boys a first speed window at about 7 to 9 and a second at 13 to 16.
• Bodyweight only for Atom. Strength training in the Learn to Train (Atom) stage should use only the player's own body weight.

Hockey Canada's 2020-21 development guides on skating, shooting and defence restate that there should be no position specialisation before U13 and that every child should play every position through U11.

Games and practices in the LTPD

For Novice players (Learn to Play), the 2013 manual asks associations to work toward two practices for every game: about 25 to 35 games and 50 to 70 practices over a 26-week season, with players moved through several positions and practices designed so players succeed at least 70 percent of the time. Its ideal seasonal charts give about 15 to 20 games for Initiation, 30 to 35 for Novice, 40 to 45 for Atom and 45 to 50 for Peewee. The manual also states that evidence suggests the number of games Canadian youngsters play slows their development.

USA Hockey's ADM stages

USA Hockey's 8U ADM parent guide lists these stages:

The guide's list ends with a final stage, Hockey for Life.

A USA Hockey ADM article of 8 August 2014 places the skill-acquisition window at ages 9 to 12 for boys and 8 to 11 for girls, and quotes ADM technical director Ken Martel on matching training to what suits each age.

Cross-ice hockey for 8U

The 8U guide calls USA Hockey's cross-ice games and station practices "Red, White and Blue Hockey". The idea is to shrink the ice to children's size so every player, goalies included, gets more puck touches and more involvement, and the ice is used better. It suggests 8U practices split into six stations, rotating every 7 to 8 minutes, and game days split into three zones with two games and a skill area, rotating every 12 to 15 minutes.

Stephen Kerr, writing for USA Hockey on 18 December 2019, said ADM principles had centred on 8U cross-ice play for about ten years, and that some districts, such as Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, had extended cross-ice games to 10U. In the same article Kenny Rausch, USA Hockey's director of youth hockey, compared moving 8U players to full ice at 10U with going from 50-yard sprints to a 5K.

The Train to Train stage

USA Hockey's document for this stage (girls 11 to 15, boys 12 to 16) describes a window of accelerated adaptation to aerobic, speed and strength training, recommends at least one complementary sport, and puts late-stage specialisation in hockey at the end of the stage. For 14U and 16U it recommends:

• A split of 60 percent training, 10 percent competition-specific training and 30 percent competition.
• Three to four sessions a week of 60 to 80 minutes on the standard track, four to five on the high-performance track.
• About 80 to 85 practices and 35 to 40 games a season.
• An overall activity mix of 40 percent hockey, 30 percent fitness and 30 percent other sports.

The document says Level 3 coaching certification is required to coach 14U and 16U, and Level 4 for 16U teams going to national tournaments. Its off-ice advice is on the off-ice training page.

Where the two plans differ

USA Hockey's Train to Train document gives girls a second speed window at 11 to 13. The Hockey Canada 2013 text read for this site does not give the girls' figure in the same passage, so that comparison could not be completed.

New to the game? The getting started page covers the learn-to-skate and learn-to-play programmes that come before any of this.