as kids, 
most of these rising stars 
played other sports 
in addition to hockey.

We had an opportunity to talk with some of the junior players on Team Canada. 
 

They told us that they played a variety of sports 
in their younger, formative years. 
Soccer, 
lacrosse, 
baseball 
and golf 
are some of the sports that were most often mentioned.

How can playing other sports contribute to their hockey game? 

The players said they learned other skills that made them better hockey players. And they gained extra confidence, which is key to hockey success. 
 

Without their experiences in other sports,
many players feel
they wouldn’t have become elite hockey players.

Two brothers on the team, Dougie(Boston Bruins 1st round Draft 2011) and Freddie Hamilton, are a great example. Dougie told the Globe & Mail that their parents told them to just play the sports they loved. “They never pressured us into playing hockey,” he said. 
 

“We played pretty much 
every sport growing up.”

Their parents told TSN that they simply emphasized having fun and doing their best.
 

The fact 
that well-rounded athletes make better hockey players 
has been known for a long time. 
Gretzky, Orr, 
and many others 
all played a diversity of sports
before specializing in hockey. 

In fact, Hockey Canada has made 
playing a broad range of sports 
a cornerstone of hockey player development.

“Hockey Canada believes that physical literacy for young boys and girls will lead to greater success and longevity in hockey and all sports,” Corey McNabb, who is charge of coaching and player development for Hockey Canada, told us.

McNabb also said that “the ability to learn agility, balance and coordination that comes from playing a variety of sports, builds a solid foundation for athletic success, physical fitness and more importantly, staying active for life.”
 

For Hockey Canada, the recipe is simple:
ensure your son or daughter practices a diversity of sports 
during the off-season. 

Parents who want to help their kid succeed in hockey can learn a lot from some of the best junior hockey players in the world as well as from a long list of hall-of-famers: 

Well-rounded athletes 
do make the best hockey players.

Wearing the Spoked-B was Special

And Mike Mottau would like to remain in Black & Gold next season

BOSTON, MA -- The B's lone local boy isn't looking to go elsewhere next season, but as of July 1, Avon's Mike Mottau knows that he might end up with a new professional address.

For obvious reasons, the former Boston College and Thayer Academy standout would like to remain in New England.

"It was good," said Mottau of his return to Boston in a Black & Gold jersey and playing in front of friends and family. "It took a while to get there, but I think you appreciate it more after a long time to get there and you want to hold onto it as long as possible."

Unfortunately, the B's early exit from the Stanley Cup playoffs didn't afford the Mass.-native too much of an opportunity.

All told, the Quicy-born Mottau played just six regular season gams and two playoff games for Boston, but gave the B's needed depth on the blueline since he was acquired (with Brian Rolston) in a trade with the New York Islanders on February 27.

Boston's coaching staff appreciated the blueliner's contributions.

"Mike’s given us exactly what we’ve asked from him from day one," said B's Head Coach Claude Julien during first round. "He’s come in, been very reliable defenseman, [made] smart plays, a couple of times on the blue line he found the opening guy with shots to the side of the net that were either tipped [or] passed to the slot.

"He’s got a good vision of what’s out there and he makes some smart plays."

That was Mottau's reputation even before the former Eagle won college hockey's Hobey Baker award in 2000 and despite the slight playing time with his hometown team, the defenseman hopes to bring even more to the table should he be re-signed by Boston.

"You know as a player, as a competitor you want to be in the lineup and add value

while you’re in the lineup," said Mottau. "But for me just being available and ready was really important.

"It definitely tests your professionalism and gives you the opportunity to show that you

can do that as far as being ready when called upon."

But Mottau said he very much enjoyed his time with the Bruins and wants to continue to drive to work on I-95.

"I had a great experience actually," said Mottau. "The guys in the room are second to none, the room was very welcoming and on the ice I felt guys work with each other.

"When you have a good run, it does translate on the ice and that’s one of the things I saw here."

And fulfilling a life-long dream translated into a great experience for Mottau who remained happy just to have the opportunity to don the spoked-B.

"Growing up in the area and having the pride of wearing that jersey, I always took a couple of extra seconds before I put it on the games that I was in because it meant so much," said Mottau. "Yeah, I’d welcome that [again] and see where it takes us.

"Hopefully I did enough."

He (Mark) and Paul (Mark's brother) wanted to play so badly; 
they always wanted to go to practice,
they played continually, 
for hours and hours
in the driveway. 

It didn't matter if they had skates on
or whether they had to play in the road 
or whether they were shooting balls…”

     
Gretzky's passion for improvement was no different. In the book Wayne Gretzky: Making of The Great One, his father Walter writes about Saturday afternoons when Wayne's friends would come by to get Wayne to go to the movies.
 

“… He wouldn't go because he wanted to stay home
and skate in the backyard.
He would skate through pylons to practice his stickhandling. 

He would shoot pucks
by himself 
until it was too dark to see whether they hit the net or not. 

He would sometimes pay friends a nickel or a dime to stay around and play goal against him.”

“But what most people don't realize was 

Wayne's love of sports went beyond hockey. 
He was in the Brantford Track and Field Club
until he was 15. 

Given his reputation for endurance today, 
it's probably not surprising he was a distance runner.
He excelled at any race from 800 meters on up.” 

Mr. Gretzky goes on to relate how 

Wayne also loved baseball, 
playing pitcher and shortstop.
     

Incidentally, Wayne was an “A” student. Mr. Gretzky writes, “ When he came home from school, he would always do his homework before heading off to play hockey”.

Wayne Gretzky says that if he were trying to come up 
through the minor hockey system today, 

"I probably wouldn't
have made it."

Gretzky, who rewrote hockey's record books and redesigned the way the game is played with his quickness and play behind the net, said yesterday 
 

that there is too much emphasis on "systems"
and not enough 
on creativity. 

It's stifling, 

Gretzky said.

"Very few Jean Béliveaus or Paul Coffeys come through the ranks now because 
we're taught so many systems and so much discipline 
at a young age that 
we've taken away a lot of creativity.

"Up to a certain age, kids should just be let out to play pond hockey.
Skate and 
be creative with the puck," 

Gretzky said at a news conference to launch a new Internet site for minor-hockey coaches.

Gretzky, wearing his hat as adviser to the Canadian Hockey Association, was at the Hockey Hall of Fame to unveil the resource Web site:http://www.coachesclub.net.
The site will include a databank of drills for coaches, video clips, an interactive mode to share coaching ideas with others and a question-answer page to seek knowledge from pros and experts.

Sponsored by Proctor & Gamble's coffee brand Folger's, it is part of the CHA's Play Right program to improve hockey development. The CHA collects a fee of $44.95 for unlimited access to the site.

"Every parent thinks their kid will make it to the NHL. That's not going to happen, but it puts a lot of pressure on these volunteer coaches. This may help with communication between parents and coaches," Gretzky said.
 

"I was lucky because my dad coached me a lot and
let me be creative. 

But he could have used this."

There are 560,000 registered players and more than 75,000 volunteer coaches in minor hockey in Canada. CHA president Bob Nicholson said the site would benefit coaches from novice to junior levels.
Gretzky ended his career after the 1998-99 season and is involved with developer Steve Ellman in the purchase of the National Hockey League's Phoenix Coyotes. He didn't hide his disappointment at the fact his former agent Michael Barnett isn't going into hockey management with him.

"A lot of people anticipated we'd move forward in the same direction," Gretzky said. "I had hoped and wished he'd come with me. . . . At this point in time, all we can do is to try and get this thing [the purchase] put to bed and closed."

Gretzky has expressed an interest in possibly managing Canada's 2002 Olympic team for Salt Lake City. Each country must put forward by May 1 the names of eight players for its roster. Gretzky will take part in meetings beginning in mid-November to begin the process of identifying Canada's eight core players.
"It's pretty easy to name eight guys," Gretzky said. "What happens is after that the makeup of the team has a lot to do with the coach. The next 12 or 13 guys are the key decisions."



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------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wayne Gretzky-Style 
'Field Sense' May Be Teachable

Jennifer Kahn 05.22.07 | 2:00 AM

Photograph by Darren Braun



In the otherwise unremarkable 1984 National Hockey League game between the Edmonton Oilers and the Minnesota North Stars, there are five seconds that Peter Vint will watch over and over. 

The star of this sequence is Wayne Gretzky, widely considered the greatest hockey player of all time. In the footage, Gretzky, barreling down the ice at full speed, draws the attention of two defenders. As they converge on what everyone assumes will be a shot on goal, Gretzky abruptly fires the puck backward, without looking, to a teammate racing up the opposite wing. The pass is timed so perfectly that the receiver doesn't even break stride.

"Magic," Vint says reverently. A researcher with the US Olympic Committee, he collects moments like this. Vint is a connoisseur of what coaches call field sense or "vision," and he makes a habit of deconstructing psychic plays: analyzing the steals of Larry Bird and parsing Joe Montana's uncanny ability to calculate the movements of every person on the field. "In any sport, you come across these players," Vint says. 

"They're not always the most physically talented, 
but they're by far the best. 

The way they see things that nobody else sees — it can seem almost supernatural. But I'm a scientist, so I want to know how the magic works."


Athleticism is impressive but essentially prosaic, a matter of muscle. But vision is something else, something more elusive. Opponents struggling to anticipate Gretzky's next move often became disoriented, like hunters who think they're tracking a leopard, only to hear a twig crack directly behind them. The experience was so unnerving that players who had to face Gretzky repeatedly exhibited a kind of automatic dread. Describing the feeling in a 1997 Cigar Aficionado interview, former St. Louis Blues goalie Mike Liut said woefully: "I'd see him come down the ice and immediately start thinking, 'What don't I see that Wayne's seeing right now?' "

Such talent has long been assumed to be innate. "Coaches tend to think you either have it or you don't," Vint says. Unlike a jump shot or a penalty kick, 
 

field sense — 
which mixes 
anticipation, 
timing, 
and an 
acute sense of spatial relations 

— is considered essentially untrainable, a gift. Gretzky himself once fuzzily described it as having "a feeling about where a teammate is going to be. A lot of times, I can just turn and pass without looking."

But Vint rejects the notion that Gretzky-style magic is unteachable. Before taking a job at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado in 2005, he spent several years consulting for NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, assessing the design of complex automated cockpits and looking for things that might cause pilot error. "In the cockpit, indicators will go off, and the pilot has to detect and interpret them depending on what mode the automation is in," he explains. That ability, Vint believes, has something in common with passing a puck. "They're both about 

taking in, 
processing, 
and reacting 
to complex information," 

he says.

Vint knows that the skill he calls "perceptual ability" develops, in part, to help a physical underdog against bigger, stronger players. If you can anticipate a throw, you don't need to be as fast. If you can intercept a pass by predicting its trajectory better than your opponent can, you don't need to be as big. Steve Nash, the point guard for the Phoenix Suns, famously never dunks but passes so brilliantly that he has been voted MVP two years in a row. Gretzky was always the runt of his team: small, slow, cursed by a soft shot, and so skinny one commentator cracked that "he could wear a fur coat on Halloween and go out disguised as a pipe cleaner."

"Growing up, I was always the small guy," Gretzky has said. "I couldn't beat people with my strength. My eyes and my mind have to do most of the work."

As Vint saw it, Gretzky-like field sense was rare not because it was mystical but because no one had bothered to understand it and train for it. Then he discovered Damian Farrow. A scientist at the Australian Institute of Sport, Farrow worked with Olympians and national athletes. But unlike the coaches Vint knew, who tended to focus on physical skills, Farrow had been hired specifically to study and teach perception. If his methods struck Vint as unusual — Farrow once had the women's basketball team watch game clips through 3-D glasses and simulate playing and passing in them — that only made their success more surprising.

"When I found Damian's work, I realized that this is how you could understand a player like Gretzky," Vint says. Farrow had statistics. He had answers. "He was taking a look behind the curtain of this magical thing."

At 37, Farrow has the wiry, tanned appearance of the agelessly fit. A competitive tennis player into his early twenties, he continues to look the part, oufitted in shorts, a crisp white polo shirt, and an oversize black digital watch. A deliberate and cerebral athlete, he was not especially quick — a weakness that rankled him. So Farrow decided he would get better at anticipating his opponent's shots.

He began cataloging other players' tendencies and eventually began to make connections between a rival's posture and racket position and a particular return. Perversely, though, Farrow found that 

the more he concentrated, 
the worse he played. 

"I was thinking so much that I couldn't react naturally anymore," 
he admits with an awkward laugh. 

"I got that 
'paralysis by analysis.' "

Later, as a PhD candidate in human movement at the University of Queensland, Farrow began to suspect that the learning process needed to be unconscious in order to work. "Top tennis players can predict the direction and speed of the ball before it leaves the racket," Farrow says. "So what is it these experts intuitively see that the rest of us don't? What cues are they picking up on, and when?"

To understand what experts were seeing, Farrow meticulously dismantled the mechanics of the serve. He recruited two groups of players — novices and experts — and outfitted each with earmuffs and occlusion goggles, clear glasses that turn opaque when an assistant on the sidelines flips an electronic switch. He then put the athletes on court opposite an expert server. As the server's arm went back for the shot, Farrow would black out the goggles, leaving players to swing blindly at the incoming ball.

The experiment was not for the faint of heart. Even relatively gentle serves arrived at 60 miles per hour, battering receivers who happened to step into the shot. "The men in particular got uneasy," Farrow says dryly. He pulls out a faded photo of a man in tennis whites, standing in the ready position and peering through an oversize pair of plastic lenses. "You can see that he has a nervous grin on his face."

Great tennis players can tell from the angle of a server's arm where the ball will go. Novices generally don't have that skill. But they can learn it.




The point of the exercise was to identify exactly when a seasoned player knew where the ball would head. Farrow established five possible windows: First, he blackened the goggles just as the ball's flight path over the net was determined; second, as the server's racket made contact with the ball. Then he gave players less and less information — cutting off the image when the server's arm was cocked, as it was being drawn back, and, finally, at the very start of the toss.

Not surprisingly, receivers were better at guessing the ball's direction the later their vision cut out. But the results also revealed something more interesting. Graphs of the amateurs' reactions showed that they could anticipate where the ball would go only if they witnessed the racket making contact with it. Experts knew what would happen roughly a third of a second earlier, when the server's cocked arm was still unfolding.

What happened in that fraction of a second? A lot, Farrow reasoned. Up to a point, he theorized, the direction of a serve was fundamentally unpredictable: Whatever clues existed weren't ones that an opposing player could discern. By the time the ball had been hit, on the other hand, even a novice could make a plausible guess at its trajectory. 

What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head. 

This fraction of time is game- changing. A serve going 120 miles per hour takes approximately a third of a second to travel the 60 feet from baseline to service line. This means that an expert, who doesn't have to wait until contact, has twice as long to move, plant his feet, and swing.

This discovery fit with something Farrow and other tennis researchers had already suspected: Reflex speed is not the key factor in returning a serve. "People have tested casual players and experts, and their reaction times are essentially the same," Farrow says. The fact that Roger Federer can drill back a 140-mile-per-hour serve is partly a matter of muscle control. But it's also about processing subtle visual cues to predict where the ball will go and get to the right spot.

None of this was enough to make Farrow the hero of the clubhouse. Proving that anticipation mattered was one thing. The big question was, could it be taught? Farrow wanted to try, but he would be careful to not make the same mistake he had made with himself. He instructed some of the players from each group not to worry about predicting the direction of the serve but, instead, to focus on estimating its speed. 

The exercise was intended to force receivers to notice things like the angle of the racket head and the twist of a server's shoulders relative to his hips — all kinematic cues that also contribute to a serve's direction. Best of all, the connections would happen unconsciously. 
 

"It's called 
implicit learning," 

Farrow says. "We're getting them used to watching for the right stuff, things like more-spin-equals-less-speed, but 
 

they don't even know 
that they're doing it."

Using the goggles, Farrow then tested the speed-prediction group against one that had been traditionally coached on service returns and another control group that had received no coaching. At the end of the day, the players who'd been told to predict the ball's speed showed a small but significant improvement, anticipating the serve correctly an extra 5 percent of the time. More startling: 
 

The traditionally coached group didn't improve at all.

The difference was small, but it came quickly. After finishing his PhD in 2002, he applied for a job at the Australian Institute of Sport. "I wrote them a letter saying, 'You don't have someone like me, and you should,' " he says. "To their credit, they agreed."

Visiting the AIS campus is a bit like going on athletic safari. Located in the thinly forested hills of Canberra, the sprawling complex hosts roughly 300 athletes of various talents and physiques, from rangy national team basketball players to compact Olympic swimmers. On a summer morning after a thunderstorm, the sandstone cobbles are steaming and the air is warm and sharp with the antiseptic smell of gum trees. As I make my way to Farrow's office, a small herd of cyclists sweeps by, veering like gazelles around two large statues (a soccer defender slide-tackling a forward; a ponytailed gymnast braced in a handstand).

Farrow's department is headquartered in the Sports Science and Medicine building, one of many on campus that flies the lightning-bolt flag of the Republic of Gatorade. The office he meets me in is tidy to the point of desolation — the sole personal effect a toy Chicago Bulls basketball hoop stuck on one side of an enormous filing cabinet.

Since coming to the AIS, Farrow has turned into a one-man band of perceptual training, transferring his tennis experience to volleyball, basketball, cricket, and other sports. It's the culmination of an idea that originated 50 years ago, when a psychologist named Clarence Damron flashed slides of defensive plays at high school football players and then tested their ability to identify the maneuvers from the sidelines. Students who had watched the slides were better at guessing correctly, leading Damron to conclude that a boy could learn to be a lineman the same way he learned chemistry: by memorizing which elements and conditions led to a particular reaction.

Damron's experiments sparked some interest but never really caught on. "It was mostly academics interested in the theory," Farrow says. The methods were also crude, not immersive or immediate in a way that reflected gameplay. Sometimes, players got better at the tests — responding more quickly to flash cards and recognizing simulated patterns — but it was never clear whether they brought those improvements to the field. For coaches hoping to get an edge, perceptual training was like a promising rookie who choked when he got in the game.

Even now, the few people who do try to train vision often don't bother to figure out which skills are crucial. Several Major League Baseball teams, for instance, subscribe to a program known as vision therapy. Players are tested and trained on how quickly they can respond to arrows and dots flashing across a screen. But when an elite player like Albert Pujols and a non athlete are tested on their ability to identify flashing lights, Farrow says, they end up performing about the same. "That means it's not a talent that's separating the best from the rest."

Because of this, Farrow spends a lot of time simply trying to determine what it is experts see that amateurs don't. Among other things, he uses an eye-motion tracker to record where virtuoso players are looking during clutch situations, such as when passing under pressure from multiple defenders coming from different directions. He pulls up a videoclip from an Australian rules football practice that he conducted with the Adelaide Crows, a professional team. The game is essentially football crossed with rugby, and players advance the ball by kicking it to teammates. As the play unfolds, players break left and right. One runs very visibly up the middle.

Onscreen, a crosshair flits around. This is the darting sight of the Crows' kicker: a zigzag that covers the field, with minute pauses at key moments, like when he's assessing the openness of a potential receiver. Farrow's frame-by-frame analysis compares where good and bad kickers look and for how long. "We want to know, at what points are the experts doing something differently? When are they looking somewhere that the less skilled players aren't?"

Farrow has found that players who make poor decisions tend to glance at targets, rather than pausing on them. They're also more drawn to motion. "In a lot of team sports, you're attracted to the area of greatest movement," Farrow says. "But just be-cause there's a person running fast and waving his arms doesn't mean he's the best person to kick to."

Farrow has created a video database of hundreds of critical decision-making moments, which he projects life-size onto a blank wall at the Crows training center. Players watch the simulations, which are from the point of view of the kicker, and "pass" the ball to the player they think is in the best position — literally kicking it at the wall. Farrow got his idea from Bruce Abernathy, a former University of Queensland colleague who, in the early '90s, conducted similar exercises for racket-based sports like badminton and squash. On average, Farrow says, a typical footballer will get 5 to 10†percent better — choosing the best receiver an extra one time in 10 — though some have improved their game even more.

Learning these skills is difficult, however — particularly for older players with established habits. So Farrow is also thinking about how young athletes can develop field sense before their coaches make them believe it's impossible to acquire. 

To figure that out, he recently began interviewing elite players about their early life in sports. 

One factor is 
backyard games, 

or what Farrow calls 
unstructured play. 

Playing soccer with 30 other kids in a dusty village plot
turns out to foster the kind of flexible thinking 
and acute spatial attention that pays off in high-level competition.

"We should be modeling our programs on that," 

Farrow says emphatically. 

"And what do we do instead? 

We put children in 
regimented

very structured programs,

where their perceptual abilities 
are corralled and limited."

Farrow recently made a poster of Wayne Gretzky and gave it to several AIS coaches. The Great One, he points out, spent thousands of hours scrimmaging with friends and neighbors on the homemade rink behind his family's house.

Although perceptual training has yet to sweep professional sports, the idea is gaining traction with a handful of US coaches and their colleagues. In a recent meeting with the US Olympic volleyball staff, Vint found himself listening to a performance wish list that included the ability to respond to jump serves coming in at high speeds. Vint asked the coaches what they thought the problem was. Were the receivers erratic, indicating a problem with motor skill? Were they getting screened by other players on the court? No, the coaches agreed, the problem was that the receivers weren't reading the trajectory of the ball fast enough to get in position. Like tennis players, they needed to improve their ability to interpret early cues.

If all goes well, Vint will start working with the US women's Olympic volleyball team this year and then expand to the men's team. 
 

He believes that better perception has a multiplier effect, 
giving players more time to concentrate on their execution 

and, in some sports, even helping them avoid the collisions that cause injury. Vint has also been collaborating with the national youth development arm of USA Hockey, devising a program that uses goal-cam footage to help goalies anticipate which quadrant (right, left, high, low) the puck will end up in. For now, Vint has made the exercise virtual because he can't risk a goalie taking a puck in the throat. But ultimately, the goalie may be wearing goggles and playing blind — like Luke Skywalker in Jedi training.

That's not his only project. Vint mentions a two-time Olympian who recently began training in a new sport, the modern pentathlon. "She's great at swimming and running," Vint says. "Decent at shooting and equestrian. But in fencing, she's terrible." Being a good fencer means being able to read subtle cues from an opponent's body and foil position — something fencers normally pick up over years of practice. A perceptual- training program, Vint theorizes, could accelerate that learning curve, transforming his protégé from zero to Zorro.

On the last evening of my AIS visit, I watch a volleyball team practicing attacks: setting the ball, then hammering a spike down on opposing blockers. The reverberating balls in the nearly empty gym create a constant, explosive cacophony. David Ferguson, one of the team's more powerful hitters, is an enormous 25-year-old in bright blue shorts with a frighteningly large rump. When he spikes the ball, it sounds like a cannon going off.o

Last fall, the volleyball team worked on spike defense using the occlusion goggles for six weeks, cutting out the view just as the ball was hit. Knowing that you are going to lose sight of a large ball traveling 80†miles an hour in your general direction has a remarkably concentrating effect, says 19-year-old Will Thwaite, a lanky 6'10" blocker. Like the rest of the team, Thwaite practiced with the goggles two or three times a week. "I think it helped," he says. "When I played before, I mostly just reacted. But when you get to this high level, the ball travels so fast. You really have to anticipate." As I watch, one of Thwaite's teammates blocks a close- quarters Ferguson spike at the net so solidly that the ball boomerangs back at an astonishing speed.

Thwaite's coach, meanwhile, has added another twist. Since the players are getting better at reading serves, he has also quietly begun teaching servers how to hide their intentions.

Inexperienced volleyball hitters tend to telegraph their hits, says Vint, who has puzzled over these issues with Farrow: "If they're doing a quick set in the middle, they may stiffen their arms. If it's a back-set, they'll arch their back before the ball arrives."

The result has been a kind of athletic arms race, 
 

the ability to read shots 
driving a corresponding 
need for 
better fakes. 

When I point this out to Vint, he seems pleased. Like any advantage, perceptual training will likely upset the existing balance. But eventually things will even out. "In the long run," he says confidently, "I think the level of play will go up."

Maybe, but it's still a long way from awkward occlusion goggles to the effortlessly accurate no-look pass. Here in Australia, though, there's a sense of how this kind of training could change sports one skill at a time. Magic, after all, is just a collection of steps executed artfully. And while Gretzky may be hockey's Houdini, there's a lot to be said for starting out with some simple sleight of hand.
Contributing editor Jennifer Kahn (

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-06/ff_mindgames/