A Great Training Makes You A Great Trainer

Stanley Cup-winning coach Barry Trotz has a simple way of telling when a young coach is ready or not.

“I get calls to ask whether I’d hire a certain person,” Trotz says. “I know where the person is if they talk less about X’s and O’s and more about teaching people. Training people. Then you know they’re a coach.”

Drill obsession is one of the fundamental trappings of the coaching pathway, a deception that the elders of coaching repeatedly warn against.

And yet, their popularity has seemingly never been greater — particularly online, where faux-intellectualism and oneupmanship fuel a jaw-grinding rage to discover the perfect training exercise.

This isn’t to lose sight of the fact that the training environment is central to preparing a team to play. But just as one clean brushstroke doesn’t make you a painter, running a good session doesn’t make you a good coach.

Trotz puts it this way: “If they just want to talk about drills, then I know they’re an instructor and they’re not ready [to be a coach]”.

Running a great training makes you a great trainer.

There’s much more to being a great coach.

Craft Overlaps

The modern head coaching position requires you to try to master four distinct domains; yourself, the organization, the locker room, the game.

If we assume that each domain accounts for an equal amount of the impact on your success in the role, the maximum you can achieve from game craft is 25%. (And, training is merely a subset of your game craft).

Training is important. But excelling at training alone isn’t enough.

More crucial to understand is how your game craft overlaps with the other domains: how does what you’re teaching on-ice interact with what you’re espousing in the locker room, or how might it align with the organization’s immediate goals?

This is what I believe Trotz is talking about when he says he will hire a coach if they show more of an interest in teaching people than drills.

Really what he means is that they understand that each craft of coaching intersects and interacts with others, and nothing has impact in isolation. If a young coach can show an understanding of how the whole thing fits together, they’re better placed to teach people in whatever training exercises they’re running anyway.

You can watch the full video of Barry Trotz’s presentation at TCS Live here: