A Guest Post by MJ Anderson
If you’ve gone to a youth hockey game and hung around the lobby then you’ve probably heard it a hundred times:
“How many goals did you score?”
Or worse…
In the locker before the game you hear well meaning parents offer monetary rewards for goals, inadvertently adding a bit of pressure to tally that visible statistic.
As a person who has been around hockey his whole life, I just don’t get it and never will. That said, I can rationally understand that well intentioned sentiment. Goals show up on the scoreboard. You need goals to win. For many, it’s the only way they know to measure success on the ice.
Anyone who’s played this game competitively knows something that new players, new parents, and even new coaches often miss: it’s almost always someone else’s efforts that occur well before the goal that matter. A defenseman clearing the front of the net. A center fighting for possession in the defensive zone. A forward blocking a shot or forcing a turnover. Those are the plays that take away other teams scoring chances, create momentum, and develop into offensive scoring chances.
How This Started
Coach Presseau and I have known each other for a long time. Our day jobs overlapped around statistics. We found we share a love of hockey and have had similar experiences as assistant coaches in competitive programs. Our conversations about effort led him to share his tracking sheet with me—an effective and tangible tool that aligned with a lot of what I was thinking.
His dedication is commendable but I found myself intimidated by juggling the stat recording, bench management, and later transcription into excel. I still loved the idea so I experimented with coding and ultimately I built an app with React and Firebase that lets me record directly during games on my phone with simple tap controls. It tracks efforts that I believe matter so much to a player’s success — things like backchecks, forechecks, forced turnovers, battles won. Of course goals and assists are important and are tracked as well. The interface is clean enough that recording these plays is fast, even during live action. After using the app a bit, I added some additional features that we thought could be helpful, things like shot tracking and +/-. By the time we walk into the locker room after, I have a report like the one shown. We don’t often use this to direct the post game conversation, but sometimes it can be helpful.
The Breakaway
Last weekend was one of those times. Late in the game, a kid on our team had a breakaway. The ice was beat up, the puck took a bad bounce, he corrected too fast and went down.
Ouch.
We all want to bury every breakaway. Misses happen but boy falling down is embarrassing. No goals for him that game. No assists either.
Despite the team getting a W, he came off frustrated. He knows he needs to shake it off, but surely that breakaway is still living in his head.
But here’s the thing; he had a great game. The season is still early, but it was easily his best performance. When I looked at the summary of our effort stats the data backed it up! His name was solidly at the top. He had more individual battles won than some kids had forechecks or backchecks combined. A visible representation of everything I’d seen all game.
I walked over and showed him the numbers.
It didn’t completely fix his mood, that breakaway still stung. But for a moment he saw what I saw: he showed up. He competed. He fought for pucks. He did the things that create scoring chances. He did the things that take away scoring chances. He did the things you need to do to win hockey games. In that moment, he had real and tangible proof of his efforts, and proof that we saw him.
One conversation doesn’t change everything. But I believe consistent positive reinforcement on efforts that matter is important. I don’t want a kid to feel invisible because the only stat they hear is “0 goals, 0 assists” even after one of their best games.
Is Stat Tracking Overkill?
I’ll be the first to admit that tracking all these stats for youth sports seems a bit crazy. However, the effort to track stats is driving at something else. I’m trying to dive into a problem we wanted to solve. The same problem those well meaning parents were trying to solve with the promise of money for goals: How do we get kids to show up with the right efforts and with more consistency!
Some of the kids are responding. After I started sharing the output, it didn’t take long for a few to ask: “Can I see the sheet?” I think more than anything else, they want to see if they are seen. I want them to internalize that every shift is likely to provide multiple opportunities to be seen!
The Perpetual Question
How do we develop better hockey players? The fact that thousands like me keep working on it is proof there is probably not a final answer, only steps down the right path. There’s always more to work on both on and off the ice, but I know encouraging effort and team hockey is part of that right path.
If you’ve read down to here you’re probably thinking that this is hardly an original thought. It’s not, and it’s also not the point. The tools we have today make it easier than ever. You can use pencil and paper to do the work, you build or buy an app, or if you have the budget you can employ AI to review video data and do it all for you! You can make the invisible visible. Will that actually change how kids play and develop over time? I’m not certain yet, but I am making the effort because I believe it will help.
About the Author
MJ Anderson is a hockey parent and (very) amateur software developer in Toledo, Ohio who built a stats-tracking app to help recognize and celebrate the efforts that he believes are at the heart of hockey development. Inspired by conversations with Coach Presseau, he’s experimenting with whether bringing visibility to previously ‘invisible’ efforts can change how young players think about their performance and development.
