"Everything evolves and changes and we have to be open and receptive to it if we want to prepare kids to play at the next level."

It doesn’t take long for Jamie Rice to point to a shining example of how positionless hockey has grabbed a foothold in the sport.

The veteran Babson College Head Coach and three-time ECAC East Coach of the Year just harkens back a few months to the 2021 Stanley Cup Final between Tampa Bay and Montreal.

“Victor Hedman might’ve had more breakaways than Brayden Point,” Rice recalled in a recent chat with The Coaches Site.

The Norris Trophy-winning defenseman getting up in the play or leading the rush and getting a better scoring chance than his high-scoring teammate, on the biggest stage at the sport’s highest level, is the pinnacle of worldwide skill development. It can be difficult sometimes to decipher which position players are playing during an NHL game because of the speed of the game and, most of all, because of the skill of the players.

At the youth hockey level, players need to improve their instincts as much as their skills. What players learn in terms of decision-making will help them as much as shooting and passing drills to make them contributing members of their teams throughout their careers.

One way to enhance a player’s ability to read and stay involved in the play, and gain creativity as well as hockey sense, is positionless hockey. It’s a theory Rice has subscribed to throughout his decade-plus at Babson.

“At the end of the day, you can teach anybody a position,” Rice said. “You can’t teach them to be more creative. You can’t teach them to be more fearless. You can’t teach them to take more risks. You can help their skill development, but the reality is everyone comes with a certain amount. For us, we don’t call it positions. Everybody has to do everything. Everybody has to be able to defend, everybody has to be able to score, everybody has to be able to make a pass. Everybody has to be able to do everything.”

Positionless hockey has slowly trickled into the minor hockey realm. When Kenny Rausch was USA Hockey Director of Youth Hockey, he became a vocal advocate of it and did his best to convince coaches to be openminded.

“It’s hard for people to change,” said Rausch, who is currently vice-president of client relationships at RinkNet software. “[The adage] ‘it’s the way we do things’ is the most dangerous phrase in the language. Because at some point it was the way you do things.

“Let’s say you have to go get knee surgery. Do you want the knee surgery they had when you were in high school, or do you want the modern techniques now? Everything evolves and everything changes and we have to be open and receptive to it now. Because if we want to prepare kids to play at the next level — whatever your level is — you have to give him or her the tools to be able to do that. And those tools aren’t knowing where to stand as a left wing, it’s learning how to play and read and react.”

It’s important to remember that positionless hockey isn’t mayhem. Rice’s players still line up at the standard five positions on faceoffs. Once the puck drops, though, they’re all expected to do whatever’s necessary for Babson to get the best result. And there are foundational pieces Babson players stick to while playing within Rice’s plans.

“We want to be really fast in transition. We want to defend at the puck wherever it is. We want to play on the defensive inside of the puck when we don’t have it. And when we do have it, the person with the puck needs help, needs support. Everybody has an equal share in us being successful, so it can’t just be about the guy with the puck,” Rice said. “Probably the tenet of it all is you have to be able to read and comprehend and understand what the opportunities are. I never want our players to come back to the bench and say to me ‘coach, he wasn’t standing where you said he would.'”

That chance to instill players with the ability to deal with the unexpected is something that attracted Brant Berglund, Nashoba Youth Hockey director of player development and former Boston Bruins video coach who now works for the NHL, to positionless hockey with a Squirt team a couple years ago. The ‘next five up’ approach didn’t click right away with the kids, but Berglund saw steady improvement as the kids got to know how to handle each role and how to play off each other.

To better equip kids to quickly assess what they needed to do when on the ice, Berglund found that each player can identity his or her role with a number or an animal name relative to the player’s proximity to the puck. The first kid near the puck can be the 1 or the dog (hunting down the puck), and so forth.

“It all sort of revolved around the idea that you always need to look, you always need to count and you always need to talk,” Berglund explained. “Those things get compromised if you just make assumptions of ‘my winger’s going to be up the boards here, all I need to do is throw it up the boards to him.’ So you’re compromising the development of those three core, not just hockey skills, but also sport skills and life skills, by giving them this perpetual, ongoing cheat sheet.

“And beyond that, for me, you can’t ever completely program a player with what’s going on in their head.”

Rice strives for a similar mental impact on his players.

“The game is so fast, that if you think slow or play slow, you’re going to get exposed,” he said. “And it really forces everybody on the ice to think fast and play fast. And you can’t do that if you’re really rigid.”

Various countries in Europe have been adhering to a positionless structure for decades, and they stick with it through older ages. Kenny Rausch likes to tell a story about speaking with 2018 No. 1 overall NHL pick Rasmus Dahlin’s father, Martin, in front of a room of coaches. Without letting on who Martin’s son was, Rausch asked when Rasmus, a Swede, became a full-time defenseman. Martin responded: “last year.”

One year later, Dahlin was the No. 1 pick as a defenseman.

“Everyone’s jaws dropped,” Rausch said. “He even used the same terminology. My son lines up at left D, but he’s a hockey player.”

That should be endorsement enough for more integration of the positionless model for coaches at all levels.