The Becker Revolution in coaching hockey: mastery before rapidity

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Teaching hockey the right way: focus on skills, detailed instruction, start slow, then go fast (the extended interview)

cult of hockey

Hockey skills instructor Blair Becker stands in front of a group of minor hockey players at an early morning skills camp, speaking once again about a revolutionary concept in Canadian minor hockey.

“It’s execution over speed,” Becker tells his nine, 10 and 11-year-old students. “You can skate fast, but if you leave the puck behind you, how effective is that?”

Becker looks over to the whiteboard on the dressing room wall where some previous coach from the night before had jotted down a few words: “effort and intensity”.

“It’s always interesting to see what people wrote on the board,” Becker says, then drives home his point one more time. “Intensity is not always speed. Intensity could be execution.”

Most minor hockey coaches (including me) focus on running fast-paced drills, but Becker pushes a different idea, that to improve sometimes a player has to slow down, to go slow enough, in fact, that he or she can properly execute the numerous complex skills that a strong player must possess. Once the player has the basic movements mastered, only then can he do them at speed, but the bonus is he can really do them, instead of muffing up.

“I think a lot of us coaches, we are a little ignorant,” Becker says. “We think we know more but we don’t know that much. You have to open up your eyes a bit more, be open to new things and try it and see if it works. You have to have that ‘open book’ mentality.”

Saskatchewan boy, Core Hockey boss

Becker, 43, a father of four, who grew up on a farm near Lucky Lake, Saskatchewan, has been teaching hockey skills since he converted his one-car garage into an indoor studio with plastic ice in the 1990s. He is now the driving force behind Core Hockey skills training, where his genius is breaking down complicated movements into small pieces so that players can grasp and execute them.

“The culture of hockey is not a friendly culture,” he says in an interview. “I think that winning has become a big factor. I don’t think the coaches are as prepared to coach as they think they are, or should be in terms of what they need to do, and how they need to do it.

“Coaches have to understand there is a process for kids to develop, and it isn’t winning and losing, which is a prevalent thing, not only in hockey, but in other sports, and it’s killing the game. It’s killing hockey.

“They have to understand they are teachers first, not coaches. It’s taken awhile for me to understand that. But when I teach, I’m a better coach. My teams perform better. Whether I win or lose, they just perform better.

“The whole idea for me is that that kid has to improve that day, a little bit. It doesn’t have to be a lot, just a little bit, and then over time that becomes a big thing. If that kid is improving, and he sees his improvement, his passion grows, then he’ll play hockey next year.”

Along with his running Core Hockey skill camps, Becker has been with Hockey Alberta for a decade and has helped coach the U-16 and U-17 programs, working with elite players such as Hunter Shinkaruk, Mat Dumba and Griffin Reinhart.

Execution above all else

When he first started as a coach, Becker wanted his players to go constantly faster and harder, just like most other coaches. He, too, had to learn to slow down. “If you are doing a drill and you’re continually missing passes and it’s a flow drill and there’s not even really that much pressure, there’s not game pressure, what is going to happen in a game? It’s going to be even worse. They’re going to miss a lot of passes. Because that is what you’re teaching them, that’s what you’re training them to do. So it’s very important that your execution is high first, and then your speed will come.

“I understand when I hear from coaches, ‘But I don’t have time for that! I don’t have time for them to go slow.’ But you do have time. And you’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll go up to game speed after you slow it down and get it right.

When the players are going slow through a drill, Becker is looking for execution and hard passes, the same thing that he’d look for as he would in a game, only at a slower rate. If a player does pass a puck and it’s not received properly, he will blow his whistle and have that player do it again, and keep doing it until that player gets it right. Becker still has the passer of the puck fire it hard and low on the ice, a textbook pass, because that is what the passer has to learn. But it’s up to the receiver of the puck to get it right, and he must repeat, repeat, repeat until he gets it right.

Becker will do this repetition eight or nine times in a row, so that the player feels peer pressure, but also realize they’ve got to slow down enough to finally get it. “Once they do it, I praise them.”

It should be such skill development, and not winning, that should be at the core of minor hockey, Becker says.

“It’s all about teaching. Really, the only place that winning really matters is at the pro level. That is the highest level. They can’t go beyond that. They are there to win. … But in the AHL, his job is to get those guys to play pro. He’s still in a teaching environment. Western Hockey League, they are trying to get those players to be a pro.

“Every level should be about teaching, improving not only the athlete but the whole individual.”

Skills, not just drills

Rather than do drills, coaches need to teach skills, Becker says, which means breaking down each skill into the five or six basic steps needed, then having the players learn the basic skill before taking it up a notch.

Becker says his own dad Hugh coached him. Hugh made the players work hard. That was his message, a good blue collar message, work hard, be respectful. S0 Becker learned by doing, like most Canadian hockey players. He didn’t get expert instruction but played a lot of games and a lot of shinny. He went to hockey schools for a week here and there, but nothing from them stuck with him.

To develop his ideas about coaching, he read, watched over coaches, and found all kinds of coaching material on the Internet. In the 1990s, he started to coach kids one-on-one as part of the Puckmaster franchise, learning by trial and error what worked and didn’t work. He moved to on-ice work, slowly getting the skills as a teacher to work with larger groups. He also took his first son to a lot of camps and came to question how good many of them were, wondering why he should spend the money if his son wasn’t improving.

Becker  has also coached at the highest levels of bantam and midget hockey and in the Alberta Junior Hockey League.

“I have the coaching bug, so it’s hard to get rid of it,” he says, adding he loves to see his teams improve. “I enjoy the competitive nature of the game. Any coach you talk to at a high level will admit it’s addicting to be in that environment.”

Six years ago, he got on as assistant coach with the Camrose Kodiaks, where he learned from two prominent coaches, Doug Fleck and Boris Rybalka.

One key lesson was that a coach needs to stop a drill to correct players if they’re doing a skill wrong.

“They (Rybalka and Fleck) just don’t let something go. If it’s wrong, they stop and they talk and they redo it again. That is continuous. They don’t allow the mistake to continually happen, and they stand there and they know it’s wrong, but they don’t do nothing. Players don’t like it because the flow stops, but they learn quickly if they don’t do it, the flow is going to continue to stop.”

With his players, one huge focus in the mastery of passing. Too many young players are obsessed with carrying the puck, something they’re good at, but have poor on-ice vision and passing skills. “I say (to them), ‘Look, if you want to play a high level, over-stickhandling is not your option. I’m going to tell you right now it’s going to get you in a lot of trouble.’”

Passing, the skill we Canadians lack

He was recently coaching a group of top tier Atom players and saw that 70 per cent of the passes failed, with either the pass off or the receiver not able to pull in the pass. These kids can all skate fast and some of them can shoot, but the players need to work on their coordination, the messages their brains are sending to their muscles.

“Passing in Canada is the weakest skill that we have.  I think a lot of times coaches assume that the kids know how to pass and receive a pass. I don’t think we spend enough time just on stationary passing, just working on their passing, just working on the technique.”

The new sticks also make it hard to receive a pass, Becker says. They are made for shooting, so they have little flex in them. “A lot of pucks just bounce off them.”

To counteract this, Becker teaches players to have their arms, hands and hockey blade out from their bodies, then roll their wrists and cup the puck when they receive it. “You tell me when you go watch a practice how many guys have their hands away from their body when they’re stopping a puck? Zero.”

One more Becker tip in regard to puck movement: Move your feet first, then stickhandle. “You’ll see that your stickhandling actually becomes less and you’re moving your feet more. It’s just a different way of thinking. A different process your mind has to go through. But they don’t want to lose the puck, so they over stickhandle to keep it on their blade, but they can’t skate, and now guys are taking the puck from them. It’s reversing the way they think a little bit. Again, you have to stop and tell them then over and over again: Move your feet first, then stickhandle.”

With stickhandling, he focuses on peripheral vision with the kids. He wants the kids to have the puck out in front of them. Most want to have their stick to the side, but that means the puck is their feet and they can’t see it. He wants the hands in front of them, the butt end at the bellybutton. “That pushes the puck forward and allows them to see the puck using their peripheral vision.”


Another key is to roll your wrists as you stickhandle, to keep the puck heal-to-mid-blade. The top hands rolls, the bottom hand acts as a support, and the puck is cradled on the blade.

Becker also makes sure his players aren’t just in hockey stance at the start of the drill, but maintain proper posture throughout the drill, with their knees bent, their hips down and their chest upright and their head and eyes up.

“A lot of kids pass with their eyes down, and then they bring them up, and everything has changed. The game is a growing game. It’s changing constantly all the time. Players are moving constantly. If your eyes aren’t up, you’re not going to see those changes.”

When a player passes, the puck starts at his back skate, the player’s weight is on his back foot, the puck is at the heal-to-mid blade, not at the toe of the stick. The players do not sweep the puck across the ice, but make a quick release where they roll their wrists over to snap the puck, with the blade snapping to face down towards the ice, and close to the ice, so that the puck moves rapidly right on the ice. The blade ends up pointed in the direction of where the puck should go.

“The biggest one for me is that your eyes are up. You have to know where you’re passing. You have to know we’re you’re taking that puck. You can’t be guessing.”

In receiving the pass, the key is get the arms and hands away from and in front of the body.

“It’s not taught. I see very few kids with their hands away, even at the higher bantam and midget AA and AAA level. Some of them do, but not all of them, and it will affect them over time.”

The common mistake: dead-stopping the puck

The common mistake, he says, is to “dead-stop” the puck, where the puck hits the blade, but the blade never moves and the puck bounces right off of it. “They’ve got be able to have their hands away from the body, so the blade is away, and they time that puck in, so they cushion it (on heal to mid blade), they roll their wrists and they cup the puck. As that puck comes, you cup the puck and roll it over, so the puck will stick right to the blade and it stays, typically, on your blade. You want the blade to come over top of the puck and it’s magic, it just sticks to the blade.

“You go watch any game and you’ll see pucks bouncing off blades. It’s because they’re not keeping their hands away from the body and cushioning.”

With beginners, after they generally get the mechanics of passing, they will start moving slowly up and down the ice, passing the puck, first going in tandem, then one going forward while the other goes backwards. “You just get them to understand that their eyes have got to be up and their stick has got to be on the ice to receive the pass, and every time they miss a pass, they would stop, they would go back to the same area where they missed the pass, and they would start from there.”

Another tip: “The biggest thing with any player, and it doesn’t matter what tier it is, is that you allow him to fail. You allow him to make mistakes. That’s how they learn. Us coaches tend to forget that sometimes. We want perfection out of them, but this game isn’t about perfection, it’s about excellence and there’s a difference there.

“I want them to make mistakes. Don’t play safe.”

On the bench in a game, he learned from Fleck and Rybalka to have patience with his players. “As a coach, you got to take a deep breath and continue to work with that kid. Over a period of time if he continues to make the same mistakes, you got to do some other things to get through to him, but you go to allow that player to work at it and to get there.”

He talks to the players but also gets them to speak. “I think a lot of times they coaches don’t ask their players, so what happens is there is one way communication. After a while that player is like, ‘I’ve had enough.’ They get like a beaten dog. So you got to be careful of that. Once they lose their confidence, it’s very hard for them to get it back.”

In practice, he’ll look for their body language to see if they’re getting a drill. If they’re not, if they’re slumping their shoulders in failure, maybe thinking they will never get the drill, the coach has to pull back, and go one level down before building the player back up again.

Some kids don’t know how to fight through adversity, others do. Some are used to working through problems, others don’t. “I think that challenging them and making sure they’re accountable is a big part of it, too, but you do it the right way. It’s not yelling and screaming. It might be different words you use. It might be a one-on-one meeting. It might be both of you are on one knee, I say, ‘Eyes on’ so they look into my eyes and they understand I am dead serous here, and I say, ‘You need to roll your wrists (when stickhandling), because right now your blade is straight and you’re listening right now.’ So I say you’re going to take this puck and you’re going to do stationary puck-handling with one hand on top of your stick and you’re going to do rolling of the wrist because I want to make sure you can do it. So he’ll do it for ten seconds, and I’ll say, ‘So you can roll your wrist then! Go do it!’”

Coaches need more training, support

Coaches aren’t getting the support they require right now in terms of how to best use the ice and how to best use their assistant coaches, Becker says. Coaches need to take more clinics on how to teach skills in a progressive manner. When he comes out to work with a team for a few sessions, Becker says he’s not helping the players so much as he’s helping the coaches, giving them a blueprint on how to proceed with skill development.


The best way to use the ice — because there’s such a time crunch with ice so scarce —  is to break off into a number of small groups, each focused on a different skill, and each led by an assistant coach. Four small groups could be going, for example, two working on skill development, one on one-on-ones, another on angling into the boards. A coach can do this for the first half hour, then move on to a bigger team drill.

With smaller groups, each player gets more repetition and is involved more, moving more on the ice. If you were to time many traditional practices with the player handling the puck or moving in the drill, out of a typical 60 minute practice, the player might be active from nine-to-14 minutes of movement. “That other time they’re standing still.”

If you break into small groups, the players might be active 20 to 25 minutes, a vast increase.

A smaller group also fosters a personal connection between the player and the coach, Becker says, so that two-way communication will develop and the player will be more likely to process what the coach is saying and actually attempt to do it.

With assistant coaches, it’s important that the head coach mentors them. They have to be prepared to be involved with the practice, not just moving pucks and pylons around. Even if the asst. coach is not knowledgeable, the head coach must spend the necessary time with them before practice to get them to run a drill and teach the necessary things. “They might be nervous at the start, but by the end they going to be more involved and the kids will respond better to them…. Even if they have limited knowledge, give them as much knowledge as you have to help them out.”

The head coach must train and use his assistants

Very often the head coach will try to run all the drills, and this can work, but the coach’s real job is to look over everything, to make sure everything is running smoothly, all the skill and tactical stations.

“The head coach has got to give up some power and that’s not easy, especially us males. When we have power, we don’t like to give it up. But the head coach has got to earn trust with his coaches, just like he has to with his players. He has to let the assistants run the drill, then you can overview everything and if there’s issues, you go, ‘OK, coach, what do you see here?’

‘Well, the passes are off.’

‘OK, what are you going to do?’

’I am going to stop it.’

‘Good. And what are you going to talk about?’

’Well, they’re not cushioning the puck, they’re not rolling their wrist, they’re not cupping it.’


If an asst. coach doesn’t know what to do or say, Becker will teach him. But if he does know, Becker will back off.

Becker says it took him years to learn to work well with his assistants, that when he first started as a coach he didn’t want to give up that power, and wanted to run everything. But by the end of the year he was mentally fried.

Becker also teaches game awareness, how to play away from the puck. Even the top players will have the puck on their stick 45 seconds to two minutes in a game, a small amount of time, so play without the puck is crucial.

As for others taking what he does, and running with it, maybe offering a rival clinic, Becker is not worried about that.

“I’m not afraid to give out information because to be honest with you, 90 per cent of the people don’t use it anyways. It’s the way we are as humans. It’s the way it is.”

