Different?

Time to Break from the Flock

 
 

When We Say Different…We Mean

The odds of your son or daughter ever playing professional sport are ridiculously LOW. In fact, the odds tell us, that over a lifetime you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than playing professional sports.

Sport is a Platform for Long-term Personal Development

We believe that youth sports and youth hockey isn’t about wins or losses. We aren’t building professional athletes. We are building young people with a love and a passion for sport and are helping instill the following:

  • Confidence

  • Character

  • Leadership

  • Focus

  • Gratitude

  • Hardwork

  • Competition

  • Self-Improvement

  • Discipline

We are doing this through a focus on skill development. Our focus is both hard skill and soft skills development:

  • Examples of hard skills

    • Skate faster | Shoot harder | Pass better

  • Examples of soft skills

    • Be a better teammate |Be stronger and more mentally resilient | Learn to compete and compete hard

The majority of youth hockey models are either:

  • Volunteer programs run by well meaning and intentioned people who want to have a positive impact, but aren’t as effective as they can be.

  • Or they are for profit ‘elite’ models designed to capitalize on the hockey dreams of parents and kids (albeit, it is more likely the parents).

Either way, both models get upended by the perceived need to have teams compete for wins or ranking which results in extensive travel, more games than practices and an emphasis on the wrong aspects of the game (e.g. tactics). This is a classic case of short-term-ism and a focus on the wrong outcomes.

Our objective is Simple

We can build better people and better hockey players by pursuing a model that emphasizes skill development over games. Kids still need to compete (and we are huge advocates for intense competition). Kids still need to play games. But our approach emphasizes practice and skill development over standings and rankings.

This isn’t something we made up. It is based on a successful model that has been battled tested in the heart of hockey (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) and has inadvertently created Prep School, NCAA DI and DIII and NHL hockey players.

Learn more about this unique hockey approach.