The season has officially started, off the ice, at least. There was a new NCAA rule that allowed us to start the season this past Monday with off-ice training and teaching. We are able to do this extra week of off-ice work as long as we take two full weeks off over the Christmas break. As long as we take those days off, we are able to hold this week within the 19-week playing season allowed by the NCAA. We are currently taking advantage of this opportunity by doing a number of things to prepare for the season.
We gave our guys workouts for the pre-season back in early September so the guys are expected to be in shape and ready to go. With that, we gave them a fitness test to prepare for that we finally got to test them in this past Tuesday. The fitness test that we do is a 300-yard shuttle run. The guys have to run 25 yards out and back six times, and they have to do it under 60 seconds. They then get a three-minute rest before doing it again. They go through this three times and have to get all three under the 60 seconds. The guys did the test on Tuesday morning at 7am and if they did not pass, they will do it again on Thursday morning and Saturday morning if needed. This test has given us more accountability to come into the start of the season in shape and ready to go.
We will also be holding three classroom sessions with the guys to go over all the X’s and O’s. We will establish and implement all of our systems so that when we enter the on-ice tryouts on Monday, Oct. 17, we will be able to evaluate on their ability to play within a system, as well as just their skills. Monday we will meet about offensive concepts and our forecheck. Wednesday we will meet about our defensive concepts and our D-zone coverage. Friday we will meet about our neutral-zone systems, as well as faceoffs.
We will also have Kevin Ziegler, SJU strength coach, come up two days to hold classroom sessions on nutrition, recovery and leadership. These meetings will take place on Tuesday and Thursday. Kevin is great at teaching the guys about recovery and will not only talk about what is important to eat and drink, but he will talk about things like the importance of sleep in recovery. Kevin is also great at motivating the guys and will talk to them about the importance of things like accountability and leadership to a team’s success.
Finally, we will close out the week with a team-building activity this Saturday morning. The plan is to have the guys do a long scavenger hunt where we will split them in teams and make them compete against each other. This scavenger hunt will require endurance, smarts and strength. I don’t want to give too much away as the guys may be reading this before the weekend. If they are, they should prepare themselves to put on a few miles and to become more familiar with the SJU campus.
This week is a great chance for our guys to get to know what Johnnie Hockey is all about. They will learn our identity as a team. They will learn what is important to our success. And finally, they will learn that we have a great group of guys and leaders on this team.
Let the games begin!
