The Darryl Easson lead coaches training program was even more of a success than expected as 60 coaches were in attendance compared to the usual 25. The Weekend Read this week focuses on the updated coaches development program.
Darryl Easson is is the coordinator of coaches development for the Hungarian Ice Hockey Federation, he talked to icehockey.hu about invoations are hopeing within the program.
The International Ice Hockey Federation has an online Hockey Center which was developed to aid coaches, there are about 550 drills in the database. A coach can put together an entire practice program by just going through the drills that are available when they register on the website. The website was started in Finnish but it has English and Russian pages as well. Darryl and his staff are trying to get this more accessible to Hungarian coaches.
“Instead of having to reinvent the wheel, we just had it translated into Hungarian. we still have some content in English however the menu is completely in Hungarian so it is easier to navigate.”
“We have drills on there, you can search by drills, this is part of one of my projects for the IIHF, this has videos and the coaches know what to do. All clubs and coaches have access to this website, they can register to see what are the best drills to do for different aspects of hockey.”
“The idea is that you can even put this information into a practice that the players can also do on there own.”
“We looked at our licensing program was that a lot of coaches had the high qualifications but did not have the hockey knowledges. The past two years we tried to add supplementary courses, which are not all hockey specific. We have also added first added courses since that was not required until now also skating courses were also asked for, that will have a figure skating coach, a speed skating coach and a power skating coach brought in. On top if they pass the qualification goes on to what they got from the university. and this can be done during the international breaks.”
“We are open to any coach saying, hey we need more of this or that. one final thing would be that we make our own videos, but that would be one of our last things.”