To celebrate Women's History Month, we're taking a look back at some of the inspiring females who have graced the TCS Live stage.
Over the years, we're proud to have provided a platform for female presenters to share their experience and insights with our global coaching community. This collection of women have provided some of our most memorable presentations on everything from on-ice skill demonstrations, to keynotes talks on leadership and culture.
Tara Watchorn - How to Build and Capitalize on Momentum
After an illustrious playing career, Tara Watchorn is back at her alma mater as Head Coach of the Boston Terriers Women’s Hockey Program. Watchorn is always preaching to her team the value of gaining momentum and at TCS Live 2024 she discussed how to build and ultimately capitalize on those peaks and valleys in a game.
Watchorn’s biggest message to her players is not to be bigger than the person next to you. A simple way to do this is line changes. When everyone is fresh and eager to get out there and involved in the game, momentum follows naturally. Watchorn hyped the benefits of building momentum as a team because it enhances value and understanding for all roles in a team’s line up. It also creates an energy mismatch with your opponent while also increasing the likelihood of causing an icing and penalties by the other team. The more time and space generated causes more quality scoring chances. Watchorn preaches to her team about the three shift idea. Rather than thinking about needing to score right away, Watchorn tells her players to focus on putting three strong shifts together where all lines can build off each other.
Shift lengths are the key to a team's success. The likelihood of getting a shot later in your shift decreases by every second. For the best players to be impactful they need to be fresh and short shifts is the way to make that happen.
Rachel Flanagan - Retrievals and Exits: Owning the Middle
At the TCS Live at St. Andrews College in the fall of 2024, Rachel Flanagan showed us how to start the attack in the middle of the ice - 200 feet away from the opponent's net.
There are two key states in the game: you either have the puck or you don't. I'm serious. You're defending or you're attacking. Of course you can put the puck in space while you're on the attack so you can recover it closer to the other net, but the concepts remain true. If we can leave our zone with possession, skate through the neutral, and finally enter the offensive zone with the puck on our stick, that gives us a better chance to score than dumping it in. But the other team is trying too!
That's why Flanagan answers the question of how to manipulate what the defending team is doing so you can attack faster and more efficiently.
Kim Weiss - The Importance of Wall Play and How to Incorporate it into Practice
Kim Weiss understands the importance of wall play in hockey. She delivered a thorough and upbeat presentation at TCS Live 2024 in Ann Arbor, Michigan that got her players moving the puck off the wall quickly and more efficiently.
For Weiss, the three habits of elite wall play include a focus on shoulder checking and scanning, getting the first touch of the puck, and including deception in a player’s next move off the boards.
To get going Weiss puts her players through a simple drill of collecting the puck off the wall with no pressure while focusing on shoulder checking. She added a deception turn before picking up the puck and passing it off to the next player in line. The next phase in Weiss’ drills is to add a little bit of pressure as a player picks up the puck on the boards. This allows her players to get comfortable with using the three habits that make for elite wall play while having a defender on them. This also helps her players read and react to where the pressure is coming from and creates a more game like situation.
Interested in learning from more of hockey's top female coaches? Save your seat now for this June's TCS Live coaching conference!
Carla MacLeod - Creating Authentic Connections
Since the Czechia’s National Women’s team began playing in the World Championship in 1999, the team has medaled twice: in 2022 & 2023. Those are the first medals in the history of Czechia’s National Women’s team program. What’s significant about that is those are the first two seasons the team has played under Head Coach Carla MacLeod. What’s the secret to such an impressive turnaround on the world stage? Being authentic.
To MacLeod, who is currently the Head Coach of the PWHL's Ottawa franchise, that means asking players straight up what they need from the coaching staff in order to be successful. The response she got from over 80 per cent of her team was honest communication and feeling respected. This gave MacLeod a glimpse into how the team had been run prior to her arrival and reinforced that it wasn’t necessarily going to be about what she was teaching, but how she was teaching it.
Check out MacLeod's talk from last year's TCS Live where she shares why coaches need both focus and fun to be successful, not just one or the other.
Kori Cheverie - How to Turn Off Auto-Pilot and Develop High-Performing Players
There seems to be a belief in the hockey world that once a coach reaches a certain level of coaching, say having a role on an Olympic team for example, they’ve made it. The truth is, coaching is just like playing and is anything but linear. PWHL Montreal Head Coach Kori Cheverie reminded everyone that during her powerful TCS Live presentation in 2023.
Cheverie was named an Assistant Coach of the Canadian National Women’s team for the 2022 Beijing Games. Prior to leaving for the games, Cheverie tested positive for Covid and was unable to make the trip with Team Canada. Instead of being down on herself, Cheverie changed her mindset. She altered her sleep schedule and continued to coach the team virtually, ultimately leading to a gold medal for Team Canada.
Following the Olympics, Cheverie led the Nova Scotia U18s at the Canada Winter Games to a silver medal and a generational upset over Team Ontario.
During all this winning, Cheverie made a drastic mindset shift as a coach realizing perfection and fearing failure have no place behind the bench. Watch as she reflects on her experiences and encourages coaches to be curious and creative about the possibilities of what can be accomplished.
Cathy Andrade - Leveraging Crossover Patterning for Skating Development
When Cathy Andrade moved from Calgary, Alberta, to San Jose, California, in the early 90s, she did not hang up her skates in favour of a surfboard.
In fact, she did the opposite.
Andrade, a former competitive figure skater, doubled down on life in the rink and is now regarded as one of California’s premier power skating instructors. She has coached tens of thousands of skating lessons to athletes ranging from minor level hockey players through NCAA D-I, PWHPA, OHL, AHL, KHL, USA National Team, Olympic Team members & NHLers, over the past 37 years.
At TCS Live 2023, Cathy, alongside her son Cameron, demonstrate and teach patterning to become the most effective skater possible. No more wasted glides, don’t hang on your toes, improve your posture, learn mohawk turns, and learn how to use your undercut when coming off your inside edges.
Emily Engel-Natzke - How to Scale Up Your Career as a Video Coach
Not only does Emily Engel-Natzke enjoy breaking down plays, she’s a big fan of breaking down barriers.
Engel-Natzke is the Video Coordinator for the NHL’s Washington Capitals and has been the franchises’s first full-time female coach for the past two seasons. But just like the players on the ice, it took a lot of hard work and determination to get where she is today. At TCS Live 2023, Engel-Natzke detailed her inspirational journey.
The Colorado product, who has a Bachelor of Fine Arts/Film from the University of Colorado-Boulder, got her coaching career started in 2014 with the University of Wisconsin as Video Coach for the women's basketball team. With hockey always being her end goal, she eventually took on the role as Video Coach for both the men and women's hockey programs the following season. After two seasons, she would be promoted to Director of Hockey Operations for the men's program, along with her duties as the team’s Video Coach. Under the leadership of Badgers head coach Tony Granato, Engel-Natzke gained the valuable experience that led to a historic signing with Hershey; at just 29-years-old, she was hired to be the Video Coach of the Hershey Bears, Washngton’s America League affiliate, and in the process became the first female coach hired in the AHL.
Cara Morey - Building Resiliency in Your Players and Program
Since Cara Morey was announced as head coach of the Princeton women's hockey in June of 2017, the program has won its first ECAC tournament title, won an Ivy League championship, qualified for two NCAA quarterfinals, set the program wins record, and established itself as a weekly inclusion in the national top-10 rankings.
Harry Potter humour aside, the turnaround the Tigers have made under Morey has been nothing short of magical. In 19 seasons before her arrival, Princeton advanced past the quarterfinals in their conference tournament just three times. The Tigers already have moved past the quarterfinals in three of four seasons with Morey, including a memorable ECAC tournament title in overtime over number one ranked Cornell in 2019-20.
How is such a turnaround possible? At TCS Live in Ann Arbor this past June, Morey shared some insights in her presentation titled Developing Resiliency and Grit in the Modern Player.
Leah Hextall - Not One of the Boys
Leah Hextall is a trailblazer and when the ESPN commentator speaks, well, she always has something important to say. That was especially the case when she spoke as one of the headliners at TCS Live.
What Hextall had to say was raw, emotional and shocking, but sadly not surprising.
Play-by-play commentators often feel like friends to us all. They’re with us during some of the most memorable sports moments of our lives. Hextall’s 27-minute presentation was the highlight (and lowlight, understandably) of TCS Live and of the 36 presenters who spoke during the three day hockey coaching masterclass, no one’s talk garnered more support from those lucky enough to be in attendance.
