The puck has just crossed the red line behind your goalkeeper and you have just lost a close game in overtime. A game that you should have won easily has become a crushing defeat after multiple chances to hold on to the lead and win. Normally as a coach or even as a player you say “we’ll get ‘em next time” or “we still have the rest of the season”, but this time around you don’t have the rest of the season. You only have the rest of the playoff series or you only have a two or three games left in a round robin tournament. You walk back into the locker room; you look at your team and say…
This is where the hard part starts, what do you say, how do you approach the situation? You have just turned from coach, assistant coach, or team captain to psychologist or psyhiatrist. Everyone agrees that you have to put it past you and move on. Hungarian goalkeeper coach Gary Clark says that in a situation like that you want to “check the baggage at the door and focus on what you have to do in the next game”. Clark says that if you are a left winger then you have to tell yourself that as a left winger you have focus on what ever the coaching staff is asking from you. Linus Schellin, former Ferencváros and current Újpest player says that as a player you tell yourself that we can do better, and usually that is the case, then you forget about it and look at the next game.
In theory this is all great but the players will still have that feeling of being down and they might be thinking “if only I had down this or that”. Sometimes you have to talk about one or two of the smaller things that you know were not mental mistakes. Hungarian assistant coach Glen Williamson said that you want to touch on a thing or two just a little bit and then look to the next game. Darryl Easson, sports development manager for the IIHF and former coach says that you just look forward, at least tell the players that and act like the game never happened. As a coach you will look at the film of the game and try to figure out what mistakes were made, were they ones that happen 1 in 100 or 1,000 or is it something that happens pretty often.
There is another player aspect, you are mad as hell and want to get back onto the ice. “Any time I lose in a fashion like that I just want to get back onto the ice as soon as I can” says Jan Bylesjö one of MAC’s youth coaches. Coach Williamson has a similar view, “winners get greedy, losers get mad”. Fomer Hungarian national team player and Attila Hoffman said “there are times you never know how they will react and you hope for the best”.
Szabolcs Závodszky
Twitter: @Zavodszky