The Beginning

It was a Thursday night. Our designated practice night at our local community centre arena.

The drill I launched that night was one I had seen the day before on Twitter (I still call it that). The tweet was beautiful.

It had music. It had rapid chop cuts of the ice, the puck, the net. It even had players!

The drill was simple enough. It was a flow drill—a warm-up drill, per se—with players in lines in all four corners of the ice.

On the whistle, Player 1 from the bottom-left corner skated hard toward the centre line, received a pass from the top-right corner, looped tightly around the centre circle, passed to the bottom-right corner, transitioned backward, received a return pass, pivoted forward, and drove the net for a wide-open shot.

Then the next whistle blew and the opposite corners mirrored the exact same pattern. In some circles, this is called the Infinity Gauntlet flow drill. I'm sure it has many names. Whatever you call it, it looked great from ice level.

It looked even better later on LiveBarn.

But then reality snuck up on me. I felt compelled to watch it again.

Yikes.

The illusion of this drill is that it looks great. It really does. It has flow. There is almost no friction. With no defenders, the puck moves smoothly from tape to tape, creating a rhythmic clack-clack-clack across the ice.

It has constant motion. Players fly around circles, pivot, pass and take hard shots. The practice looks fast-paced and high-energy. And it has great choreography. From the stands—or the bench—it looks like a beautiful, complex machine.

It looks like hockey. The problem wasn't that it was a bad drill.

If I wanted passing rhythm, edges, timing, or simply to get everyone moving, maybe it served a purpose. The problem was what I thought it was teaching. I had mistaken activity for a learning environment.

So here's the truth: I have run some really good drills that taught almost nothing.

That's a strange thing to admit as a coach. Especially because coaches love drills.

We collect them. We save them on our phones. We watch them on Instagram. On YouTube. On The Coaches Site. We steal them from other coaches. We put them into practice plans and feel a little better when the page is full. I have done all of this for years.

And if I'm being completely honest, there was a time when I thought good practice design was largely about finding good drills.

The right drill. The right progression. The right sequence. The right coaching points. But somewhere along the way, I started noticing something.

Two coaches could run essentially the same drill with essentially the same group of players and get completely different learning from it. One group might spend ten minutes passing a puck around beautifully. The other might spend ten minutes scanning, communicating, supporting, making decisions and solving problems.

Same ice. Same players. Same drill. Very different learning.

That bothered me.

Because if the drill was the teacher, shouldn't both groups have learned the same thing? Maybe the drill wasn't the teacher. Maybe the learning lived somewhere between the player, the problem and the environment.

And maybe the environment we created around the drill mattered much more than I had previously understood.

Reflection

Six articles into this twelve part conversation, and apparently, I still have a weakness for practices that look good.

In Article 1, it was busyness. Here, it was choreography.

Different illusion. Same problem. This connects directly to the question I left you with last time: If players learn by solving problems... how should I design better problems?

I think I used to answer that question by looking for better drills. Now I think that's the wrong question.

The better question might be: What do I want my players to notice, perceive, decide and do—and what kind of environment will make those things more likely to happen?

That's a very different way of thinking about practice. It moves us away from collecting drills and toward designing learning.

And this is where I have started wrestling with a set of ideas that, at first glance, sound considerably more complicated than they actually are:

• The Constraints-Led Approach.
• Ecological Dynamics.
• Representative Learning Design.

These are terms that can make coaching sound like a graduate seminar.

I say that because that was my world for a long time. I know it all too well. But underneath all the terminology is an idea I find remarkably simple: Design the environment, not just the drill.

Players don't learn hockey in isolation. They learn in relationship with a puck, teammates, opponents, space, time and pressure. Change any one of those things and you change the problem. Change the problem and you change what players have to notice and decide.

That's the part that finally clicked for me.

What This Doesn't Mean

This doesn't mean throwing players into a game and hoping they figure everything out. It doesn't mean abandoning technique. It doesn't mean coaches stop teaching. 

And it certainly doesn't mean every drill needs to become some elaborate game-based experiment. We still need to teach. We still need to demonstrate. We still need to provide feedback.

But perhaps our job is bigger than delivering information. Perhaps our job is to create the conditions in which the right information becomes noticeable.

That is a subtle difference. But I think it's an important one.

What I Changed

I didn't throw the drill away. I changed it. Instead of the player knowing exactly where the next pass was going, I added a defender. Instead of the receiver skating a prescribed route, I gave him two places where he could find space.

Suddenly, the passer had to look up. The drill got uglier almost immediately.

Passes missed. Timing broke down. Players had to talk.

Perfect.

Now there was something to solve. And that, I think, is the distinction I had been missing.

I hadn't necessarily created a better drill. I had created a better problem.

Tuesday Night

The next time you sit down to plan a practice, don't start with the drill. Start with the problem.

Ask yourself: What do I want my players to notice? Then: What do I want them to decide? And finally: What could I change about the environment to make that problem appear?

Maybe it's more pressure. Maybe it's less space. Maybe it's an extra player. Maybe it's a rule. Maybe it's a scoring condition. Maybe it's nothing more complicated than taking away the coach's voice and letting the players solve the problem.

Then run it.

Watch. And change something. Because that's coaching too.

Ending

I used to think good practice design meant finding better drills. Now I think it means designing better problems.

Inspired by Troy Ward, the drill is simply the container. The learning comes from what happens inside it. 

Perhaps the best coaches aren't the ones with the biggest collection of drills. They're the ones who can look at the game, identify the problem they want their players to experience, and build an environment that helps players discover solutions.

That's a very different kind of coaching.

And, for me, it's a much more interesting one.

Continue the Conversation

Three ideas sit underneath this conversation: Ecological Dynamics, the Constraints-Led Approach, and Representative Learning Design. Don't let the terminology scare you away. At their simplest, they ask coaches to think about the relationship between the player and the environment:

What information is available?

What does the player notice?

What possibilities for action appear?

And does the practice preserve enough of the real game for that learning to matter later?

If you're interested in going deeper, Brian Gillam has written an excellent five-part series on Ecological Dynamics here on The Coaches Site. Rob Gray's work is another place I continue returning to. I'm not trying to reproduce their explanations here. I'm interested in a slightly different question:

What does all of this mean for the volunteer coach designing Tuesday night's practice? That's the rabbit hole I'm still exploring.

My Notebook

I'm beginning to think that every practice is an experiment. We make a best guess. We put players into an environment. We watch what happens. Then we adjust. Maybe that's what coaching really is. Not delivering the perfect practice.

Designing the next better one.

But all of this has started raising another question for me. We've spent three conversations thinking about how coaches design learning.

What about the learner?

Because thirteen players can experience the same practice and walk away having learned thirteen different things. Or nothing at all. 

That's where I'm heading next.