Photo by Stefan Kubus/MiHockey

Checking out a USA Hockey Adult Skills Clinic in Plymouth (with photos)

Photo by Stefan Kubus/MiHockey
Photo by Stefan Kubus/MiHockey

 

By @StefanKubus –

PLYMOUTH – As USA Hockey’s Rich Hansen said, “everyone ends up in an adult league sometime.”

Men and women ages 21 and older arrived at USA Hockey Arena in Plymouth, Mich. Saturday morning to kick off a two-day USA Hockey Adult Skills Clinic. The 30 participants experienced a wide variety of skating, passing, stickhandling and shooting drills to improve upon their basic hockey skills.

“We kind of changed it up, and made it more of an (American Development Model)-style practice where they’re moving a lot more and station-based, and we got pretty good feedback from the participants so that was good,” said Hansen, USA Hockey’s coordinator for adult hockey. “The main point of this is to have fun and try to learn as much as you can in a short period of time.

”It’s always nice to see when you show someone how to take a slap shot, and they pick it up and have a smile on their face. These people want to learn, they want to get better, and that’s why we’re here.”

Photos by Stefan Kubus/MiHockey

As USA Hockey’s manager of adult hockey Katie Holmgren said, a lot of the attendees at USA Hockey Arena picked up hockey later in life and never received proper coaching. In their short period of time to work with the participants, Hansen and Holmgren said they hoped to provide information and drills that the players could take home and share with their respective adult leagues.

“The cool part about a lot of this is that a lot of these people didn’t start playing until they were adults, so they never got coached,” Holmgren said. “These kind of clinics and Hockey 101s and things give them an opportunity to get the coaching that they’ve never gotten before, even though it’s just three sessions. It’s something they may never have been taught, so it gives us an opportunity to have a little bit of fun with them, we can keep them moving with an ADM-style practice, but then they can ask us questions.”

While many view adult hockey as simply a recreational way to continue playing past your competitive days, Holmgren pointed out that USA Hockey holds national championships for age groups up to 70-plus, so people hungry for competition can still play for more than just bragging rights.

“I think it’s awesome. We have 70-plus nationals, so we have people playing literally until they can’t skate anymore, whether that’s by their choice or a doctor told them they can’t. This kind of stuff is important. They’re out there having fun, they want to learn just as much as a kid does, sometimes even more, so they’re better sponges. Anything we tell them to do, they’re going to do it, because they want to learn.”

USA Hockey plans to incorporate more events like the Adult Skills Clinic into their newly-purchased arena – a facility that their National Team Development Program now calls home. In addition to general maintenance and wall-to-wall rebranding, two stories are being added off the back of the Olympic-sized ice sheet on the east side of USA Hockey Arena – one of which will feature a state-of-the-art training facility and the other will hold conference rooms, offices for USA Hockey staff, classrooms and a theater room, which the NTDP aims to make available for local youth hockey organizations and other USA Hockey education programs.

“That’s really important for our company as a whole and being able to do events that just not highlight the National Team Development Program, but highlights it to potential fans,” Holmgren said. “But it’s also nice for us to be able to use the facility and bring other events to it.”

Hansen said it was his first time inside the building and, despite the heavy renovations in year one, echoed Holmgren’s sentiments.

“It’s great, we’re excited about it, obviously, back at the office. This is my first time out here and, obviously it’s under heavy construction, but they’re going to do it right. It’s going to be a beautiful facility, so we’ll be back here next year running the clinic and maybe we can get two or three more out here.”