A new lens for player evaluation, training design, and athlete confidence.

At the 2025 IIHF Coaching Symposium, Ken Martel, Senior Director of Player and Coach Development at USA Hockey, brought a powerful message to the stage: in order to help players grow, coaches need to better understand how they’re growing. His session, Biobanding as a Development Tool, challenged coaches to rethink the way they group, evaluate, and support players—especially during critical stages of adolescence.

For minor hockey, junior, and young pro coaches, this was a reminder that player development isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, deeply individual, and often misunderstood. And when players are judged purely by their current physical abilities, long-term potential can be overlooked or even lost.

What Is Biobanding?

Biobanding is the process of grouping athletes based on physical maturity rather than chronological age. This means evaluating players not just by their birth year or size, but by where they are in their biological growth process.

Martel showed a simple but powerful image: three 14-year-old boys, all born in the same month, standing side by side. One looked like a college athlete. One looked like a typical teenager. One looked like a child. The smallest of the three? He ended up being the best hockey player—because someone had the vision and patience to look beyond his current size.

Why It Matters

Martel emphasized that the timing of puberty—driven largely by genetics—has massive implications for how athletes develop and how they are perceived. Coaches, parents, and even the players themselves often confuse physical maturity with talent or work ethic. Biobanding helps eliminate this bias.

By separating physical maturity from performance evaluation, coaches can:

• Improve player psychology and confidence

• Modify how they design training and practice environments

• Make more informed team selections and competition structures

• Build stronger coach-athlete relationships based on empathy and understanding

Creating Better Environments for Everyone

Martel explained that biobanding isn’t about creating a perfectly level playing field—it’s about providing new challenges and appropriate support. It helps level out physical advantages or disadvantages so coaches can see more clearly who is making decisions, using space, and solving problems—without size or strength skewing the picture.

This can have a massive impact, especially on late-developing athletes. In one survey Martel shared, late maturers who played with and against similarly developed peers reported:

• More time and space

• Greater awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses

• Increased confidence and comfort with the puck

This deeper understanding helps players learn to solve problems emotionally and cognitively, not just physically—something Martel sees as a cornerstone of long-term development.

How Biobanding Works

Biobanding assessments can be based on a combination of:

• Physical testing (height, weight, growth velocity)

• Age

• Percentage of projected adult height (based on parental height and other factors)

The goal isn’t to sort players into boxes—it’s to create smarter environments where coaches understand who is on the ice, and what stage they’re in. That awareness gives coaches the ability to:

• Challenge early maturers by placing them in more demanding settings

• Give late maturers space to build confidence and decision-making skills

• Adapt their coaching language, expectations, and feedback accordingly

Development, Not Selection

As Martel put it, “The greatest impact happens when we support clubs in both game and practice settings.” It’s not enough to group players differently—coaches need to coach differently. That means adjusting how we set expectations, define success, and measure growth.

If a player is consistently underperforming against more physically mature peers, they might not be failing—they might just be developing on a different timeline. Biobanding allows us to step back and ask a better question: What does this player need to grow right now?

Confidence Through Understanding

Ultimately, Martel’s message centered on the psychological benefits of biobanding. Late maturers often struggle with self-doubt—not because they lack skill, but because they feel outmatched physically. When those players are placed in more balanced environments, they experience success, build confidence, and develop a clearer sense of identity.

Martel encouraged coaches to help their players understand why they feel the way they do in certain environments—and to give them tools to turn those moments into learning opportunities.

For coaches at all levels, biobanding isn’t about lowering the bar. It’s about shifting the focus to what really matters: creating the right challenges, at the right time, for the right players.

When we stop focusing on who’s the biggest or strongest right now—and start focusing on who’s learning, adapting, and improving—we give every athlete a better chance to reach their potential.

Noteworthy Timestamps:

• 0:00 2024-2025 Research Project
• 2:15 What is biobanding?
• 4:30 Why bioband?
• 5:25 How to bio-band?
• 6:50 Regional results
• 12:00 National results
• 14:45 Club results
• 16:30 Impact on players
• 20:40 MNA opportunities for player development
• 21:55 What’s next?