Hockey IQ Talk with Albe: How Players Learn to Identify Cues

This episode is powered by NHL Sensorena. Hello, hockey friends and families around the world, and welcome to another edition of Our Kids Play Hockey IQ Talk with Albi powered by our title sponsor, NHL Senena. Today's IQ topic is identifying cues. You know, scanning the ice is important. You guys have heard that before, but seeing something and understanding what it means are two different skills. You know, if a teammate moves, an opponent hesitates, a lane opens, a defender doesn't react. These are all things you have to be aware of. And the best players recognize those cues and use them to decide what comes next. It's a huge separator in the game. So today, joining me as always to break it down is former NHL defenseman and NHL censoring, a team member, Andrew Alberts, or Albi as we call him. Albi, let's talk about identifying cues. First question is when we say identify cues, what exactly are we asking the player to recognize? Again, we're not talking about the parents in the stands that see everything. You guys see everything. The player on the ice. What does it mean to identify cues?

Yes. Uh, great question. And first we need to simplify it and say, are do we do we have the puck and we're identifying cues to make a play? Or I guess even like uh pre-play, pre-scanning to make a play, or do we not have the puck? We're looking to retrieve the puck or get the puck from the other team. And are we playing defense and we need to identify cues in which positions and what to move with where to move? So um I'm gonna take it from either I'm a boy about to get the puck or I have the puck because it's a little more interesting. Uh, and we don't have to dive so deep into uh structural play or positioning. Uh, but if I am about to receive a puck or I have the puck and I want to make a play, I'm trying to identify a number of things. Ideally, is how close is the pressure? So how much time and space do I have? Where are my teammates? What direction are they moving, and at what speed? Uh do I have support? So again, referring to our teammates. Um, those are the two kind of big anchors that you look at. And then from there, we can dive into smaller things of uh is there pressure from the stick coming at me? Is this blade open or is it closed? Is he pressuring one way or the other? Uh is he lunging toward me, taking a step, or is he sitting back? Um, is how is his shoulder position? Again, is he lunging forward me and his shoulder drops? Uh, or is toe caps uh positioned towards me so I know he's coming at me, or is he turning one way or the other? So there's small little details like that that you really dive into, and in a fraction of a second, you need to analyze to understand the flow of the play, what's available, is there a pass lane available? Uh and then you have to go to the next step is where are my teammates? Is there support? And then you're identifying cues for them. What direction are they headed? Where's their stick position? Are they a lefty? Are they a ready? Are they open for a pass? Are they open for an indirect? Um, are they supporting the player moving away from the play? So there's so much to kind of go into. So you really asked me a load of question. But just to kind of give you some topics and some idea what I think about when I'm trying to make a play, uh, those are just a few of the details that I look at.

Yeah, look, I always love talking to you, buddy, because uh for those of you that saw The Last Dance, there's this great scene with Dennis Rodman's describing all the different types of rebounds, right? And to the layman, you know, rebound is a rebound. To him, there's 4,000 different ways to make a rebound. So you all at home just got really just a peek into an NHL player's mind. And and this is where I want to go for the audience, right? You might have heard him talk about all that and go, oh man, that's a lot. That's that's pretty overwhelming. And this is what I'll say to you the skating, the hockey, the generic stuff when your kids starting play started playing hockey seemed overwhelming. So, like anything, and this is why we're doing the series. This is a a skill set to work on. So I'll be quick discussion here, right? Um, I'd say a lot of kids, and this is the big separator aside from skill, is what you're talking about. You get the puck or you're going for the puck. What happens next? If you're trying to start this out, am I right or wrong with this, right? The key is this most kids will get the puck and just fling it, get it away from them, throw it too fast. The separator comes when you start to take the extra second to do the things that you're talking about. Scan, look up. And I think that when I coach players, I say, listen, the timing on this, you've got to learn it. You learn it at practice and you do learn it in games just by taking a second. You'll know if you took too long. But the only way to start learning it is to do it, right? You're gonna have to have some situations where you do take too long, and then in your mind you go, okay, gotta move a little faster. That's how you start to build this timing a bit. I love that you also said time and space, because I think that's another whole episode there. But when we're talking about again identifying cues, right? The first step is just to build the time to to identify cues, right?

Yes, yes. So so to build off what you're saying there is going for a puck. It's it's the shoulder checks, it's the pre-scan, it's where is the pressure, who's on me, who's available. Those are the kind of the the I guess the foundational pieces. Right. Like how much time do I have is probably your your initial thought process there. How much time and space do I have? But you don't get that unless you're shoulder checking to identify where that defender is, right? And then do I have support? And then you dive into all the other small things is do I take an angle on the puck? Do I look at the defender's stick to turn the other way? So um a lot of small details. Yeah, yeah. So for those developmental years with the five-year-olds to the nine-year-olds, it's all about just getting them in the habit of wanting to make a play and understanding their surrounding area environment. That's the first step of saying, hey, okay, I understand what's around me. I understand there's our defenders and which players are on the offense or supporting the play. And from there, you just keep building in small blocks to identify more cues and take in more information to make the best play possible. But with these young kids, we just want them to get to the habit of understanding what's around them, identifying where the pressure is, where their teammates are, and just make a play. And failures are the best thing for them at this point. Like if they can fail, you gain so much more knowledge out of a failure than a successful player rim puck every time, right? Because they just rim the puck. Oh, I broke it out. Well, you didn't learn anything, the pressure behind you, or where your teammate was open on the wing side, right? On the board side. So uh favorite part of the game uh for these young kids, unfortunately. Uh, but I don't need to tell them that.

Yeah, no, I I agree. And here's the other thing, too, I'll be able to say is that uh for the coaches listening to the show, like you want to create drills, and we're gonna talk about some drills in a minute, but you should try and create drills where a decision has to be made and not necessarily tell them what the decision is that they need to make, right? Just a very quick example for me is uh, you know, last night we were doing two on ones where the puck carrier can pass, go around the net, they can go to the net and shoot, but it's up to them, and this is what I told them it's up to them to make that decision. Adversely, the defensive player and the player without the puck, the support player, have to make some decisions too. And what we did is we started, every play was a pass, and I stopped the drill, and I said, Hey, I think you're passing because that's one of the things I said to do. I want you to read. And then the drill got real fun when we went back into it. They were starting to look up and make decisions. We can do that as coaches at the youth level as well. And again, not every drill has to end in a specific shot or a specific play. Let the kids decide. Um, I also we we we should totally bring this up, Albi. We brought we talked about a lot with the puck, and you said it in the beginning. There's also the without the puck side of this of identifying cues. I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about, you know, the kid who's on the ice just kind of watching the player with the puck do all the moves, right? You have a tremendous responsibility without the puck as well. Can you dive into that a little bit? Maybe some of the cues for that player.

I will. I want to jump back to one thing you said about a kid's making decisions on plays. And it's such a great point you said there. And for all you coaches out there listening right now, this is if you could take anything from any episode, um, not to belittle any other episode, but think of this. If you are yelling at your players to pass it or shoot it or move it or find a center or hit Jimmy, every time you give an answer to your players, you're taking a decision away from your players. So I cannot stand those coaches that are yelling, hey, Jimmy's open the slot, or pass to your defensive partner, because you are limiting their knowledge, and then they're just gonna have the puck next time be like, hey, where do I pass it? Well, coach isn't telling me what do I do, right? So they need to learn, they need to go through the failure, or they need to make decisions on their own uh if they want to continue to develop in the game.

Right. We should also take a moment to let all coaches and parents know that when your kid makes a mistake on the ice, it's not a reflection of you as a human being that your kid made a mistake. It is just part of the game. Uh and and I, you know, great a great saying is if I told you you were 10 mistakes away from hitting your goal, how quickly would you want to make those mistakes? Right. Uh the the best players use mistakes as learning. And again, the younger ages, the ultimate time to do it, right? Because there really isn't that many stakes when you're eight, nine, ten, eleven years old, right? Uh so let your kids experience the game with that. So, Albi, let's talk about what Sensorina is bringing with this. Uh, this is one there's a there's a ton of drills I think you could pick from from the lexicon within Sensorena. But uh the one that you asked us to talk about, I'm gonna bring it up here, is uh the uh multi-object tracking drill in uh sensorena. Why don't you tell us about that and how that works with um identifying cues?

Okay, so so we we've put you in a position where you are static, meaning you are not moving. So we've taken speed and movement out of the play just to simplify uh the cognitive training for this drill. And so what the goal of the drill is is to identify a teammate or player movement. Uh so one, you're anticipating an open player for a pass, but you also need to anticipate and read and identify the cues of the defender. Is he following the forward to defend your teammate, or is he uh is he hesitating and not going to be able to get there to defend the teammate? And so there's five players in the zone, and you are tracking multiple objects, again, multiple object tracking drill. So you're you're you're one identifying all of your teammates, but you're also identifying all the defenders, their movement, their positions, their stick hands, uh, the speed at which they're moving. So you're thinking in a lot of information here, but the drill moves in such a way that you can alter the speeds uh and the speed of the movement as long as as well as the passes. And so we've really built it for young kids all the way up to those that are 18, 19, 20, that are moving into higher levels. And these are the foundational skills of just understanding is somebody working to get open for me? And if they're open, I'm gonna hit them for a pass. But also, is there a defender tracking them uh to defend them? So it's really about anticipation skills and identifying cues, if you will.

Yeah, and and I've got to say this as a coach the other big value of this drill, aside from the actual drill, is that if we simulate this at a practice, your kid gets two, three reps at a practice. All right, through Sensorina, you get as many reps as you want. All right, and and again, you're training them to do this. I have seen firsthand the the Sense Arena to game or Sensorina to practice transfer, all right, because you're teaching your kid the habit now of doing it. And you can't you can't do this drill in Sensorena and then get on the ice and just forget about it. Just not how it works. So um, I love it. And I'm gonna say it again, Albi. There there's a lot of drills like this uh within Sense Arena that you all can check out. So remember, if you're interested, that's why we're doing this. Uh head over to our kidsplayhockey.com forward slash deals. You can see what Sense Arena has going on. We always have something. They're always giving us the guys are so generous, always giving us something to give to you. Uh, you can check out this drill. Obviously, we'll have some video of that drill for you to see. I parents don't show your kids because they're gonna want it, or you know, show your kids because they're gonna want it. Um, but again, the whole purpose of the show is to bring you some actionable items. So hockey IQ identifying cues. That sounded cool together. Albi, thanks so much for being here together. You got it. All right, guys. We'll see you on the next episode of Our Kids Play Hockey, hockey IQ talk. Uh, stay tuned for more. We're trying to help you and your kids. Take care. We hope you enjoyed this edition of Our Kids Play Hockey. Make sure to like and subscribe right now if you found value wherever you're listening, whether it's a podcast network, a social media network, or our website, our kidsplayhockey.com. Also, make sure to check out our children's book, When Hockey Stops, at When Hockey Stops.com. It's a book that helps children deal with adversity in the game and in life. We're very proud of it. But thanks so much for listening to this edition of Our Kids Play Hockey, and we'll see you on the next episode.