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Well it’s a day off for me so plenty of time to think about hockey. I was wondering about different ways of growing the game in NZ to increase the talent pool and overall image of the sport in the general populations? eyes. I thought maybe some form of discussion may come up with some unique answers or insight.
This will be a long post so please beware.
I started to think about where to go from here but I also thought about where we are now. The two are inseparable. Obvious solutions like more rinks and more money will undoubtedly help but I don’t think we can or should wait for some money tree to fall into our lap. The right now situation certainly involves facilities but also people. We certainly have some dedicated people but trying to think of the sport as a business, are they the right people? I should quickly say that this is no indictment on current leadership at all. I’m not going to go into their qualifications because I don’t know them and have no current desire to evaluate them. I’m just thinking of the process.
As it stands, our leadership structure is primarily based from within. Hockey parents essentially. I would imagine that grew out of necessity. Where else would the spots be filled after all? For the future, I think real growth is going to come from taking ourselves seriously and treating ourselves as a professional organization. So getting the right people into positions will be essential. Moving forward, how do we get those people? A business has the advantage of monetary benefit where they can interview a large array of people from different sectors in order to find the person who best fits the role. I think a relevant question would be how to we attract these people to our sport without the lure of a salary? Hiring from within can certainly confirm a certain passion for the game but I think skill is needed in order to achieve real sustainable growth. Do we still try to pull leadership from our relatively small membership or find innovative ways of bringing the skills into the organization? Any suggestions?
Do we consider partnerships with other smaller federations in order to pool resources? Do we involve the membership more with the decision making? Make it more democratic? Should the membership have some sort of control over the decision makers with elections?
Again it?s not a current indictment but how do we approach dissatisfaction with current leaders if any? With a small organization, limited people have major influence. If we get a person in the wrong role, removing them can have detrimental effects since they will probably still exert regional influence. Some of the great (not good but great) businesses in the world have succeeded by eliminating excess from leadership. They started with the right people in the right roles. Sometimes it meant firing a family member or doing away with nepotism that was there for decades. As a small organization, do we have the guts to take that approach? Can we farewell people who have dedicated a lot of time in the past but no longer contribute to the growth of hockey?
Moving on to a regional level, how do we increase membership? What approaches do we have and how can we improve upon them. I can?t say that I?ve seen a large leap in numbers in the 5 years I have been here. Do we take an approach like Tekapo and buy gear and subsidize youth hockey to eliminate the cost barrier? Do we start up road hockey tournaments and maybe get it into schools since its cheap? I?m around the rink often and I haven?t seen anything marketed that will attract more numbers than we would have gotten years ago. I certainly haven?t heard of anything outside the rink. It?s the people who aren?t normally near an ice rink that provide the greatest pool of potential players. The days of ?if I organize a league, hopefully they will come? is great for providing opportunity, but it doesn?t solve the problem of getting people into the sport. Any suggestions?
Could we somehow tap into the public skaters who outnumber hockey players?
Although the north island hopes rests primarily on more rinks, in the south we have underutilized rinks. In North America, centers like Gore and Alex would have a thriving community with copious amounts of players. Fighting rugby is hard but how can we imbed hockey into the culture of a small community and have them embrace it? Does it require a patron to fund a push? Does current leadership have the ability to tap into that market? Or do we need new ideas which might have to come from new people?
Again I?m not suggesting throwing the baby out with the bath water. What I?m suggesting is changing our approach and considering options. I think ice hockey needs a plan. There may be a plan in existence that I don?t know about. If there is however I would like to know what it is and who thought of it? What stakeholders were involved?
With the global game moving forward and skill level increasing internationally, I think we are at a critical juncture. I believe discussion need to be had in backrooms and boardrooms and chat rooms. Good ideas usually come from heated discussion. Let?s see what we can do about it. Your thoughts?
Apologies if its a little disjointed, I was thinking as I went.
All good questions.
Main problem, as I see it, is that NZ does not have the freezing weather conditions that encourage people to get out and play hockey in winter to make the most of it. Also, except in some parts of the south, there is no free natural ice to skate on, so the meter is always running. Paying for every minute on the ice is not conducive to building up skills from an early age. So is the policy of most rinks of not letting people skate with a stick and a puck.
To grow the game in NZ, we need a multi-pronged approach. I can think of at least 2 strategies beyond what is already happening to get things moving along more quickly:
1. Work on introducing primary school kids to the game. The stars of the future will be those who start when they are under 10 (and preferably 5 or 6 years old). We need to hook them before they get converted to rugby. Rugby is pretty lame at that age anyway. We also need to make hockey more affordable for young kids by getting grants to subsidize ice time and buy equipment for loan.
2. Get hockey on television to show the wider public what a great game it is. It also needs to be filmed professionally. Getting NZIHL games on national TV or SKy Sports would be the logical starting point. We need to create a demand for hockey on TV. It is not going to happen by wishing for it.
valid points.
Now how do we get into the primary school system? Ball hockey perhaps or something else?
It’s about $1000 per game for local tv to cover a game. Wouldn’t want to guess how much for sky although I doubt they would cover it initially unless winter games got a great response. How do we raise money for that or attract local tv?
we also need to grow the game knowledge of our existing players. there are a lot of players in new zealand with plenty of skill but no real knowledge of how hockey actually works. i am thinking of running a sort of camp next year, aimed at older players who have skill but cant play hockey, any input from the experienced players around the regions would be awesome be it advice, drills that you think are good to learn the game or even your own help down here
as for primary school yea ball hockey would be awesome but schools need proper gear, not the crappy stuff some schools already have that isnt even close to a roller hockey stick. even if we got a grant to buy one big lot of gear that a group of players could take around schools as a kind of hockey road show
what i mean is that there are a lot of players who dont know how to react in different circumstances or where to be when event “A” happens. that is one of the big reasons why imports bring so much to our national league, they just know what to do and when to do it.
we need to ingrain that sort of stuff in our players. im aiming more at the level below national league as my skill level isnt high enough to coach thereI’ll share where I’m looking at pushing Dunedin to over the next year. Our current situation is:
We have about 100+ members, plus about 150 high school players (there’s some crossover there).
Our rink is a different setup from most other clubs. We own our rink with the other two ice sport clubs, they’ll subsidise things that are important to us (currently Dunedin Thunder and our Learn to Play programme). We don’t have a problem getting more ice time, and the rink will shift around or cancel other things to accommodate us, within reason. We can therefore afford to keep ice hockey quite cheap – Learn to Play costs kids $5/practice, we can put on games for youth club members on Saturday night for $5/game, $10 for seniors.We’ve been investing heavily in gear, and apart from wanting a couple more sets of youth goalie gear, we can do just about anything we desire.
We have two things that we’re going to try and work on next year:
1. Our progression structure falls over as kids finish U16s. We have very good U13s, good U16s, and then there’s no contact league between that and NZIHL. We’ll be looking at two things – creating what is effectively an U19 league using high school teams. And creating a pre-NZIHL premiere league to increase the number of players available for Thunder selection and raise the standard of ice hockey generally.
2. Push our Learn to Play programme, which currently has maybe 20 – 30 kids going through it a year, to have twice as many kids. We’d like to have Atom games like they do in bigger centers, and we’d like to have a lot more kids coming through to U13 and then progressing up the ages.
A couple of weaknesses, both of which we’re working on, are referees and coaches. We have fairly good numbers of both, but all relatively new and inexperienced. The club has some financial resources that we have which we’re investing in these areas.
Just putting an idea out there. I don’t know what happens with promoting the game here, but when I was a kid I grew up in Arrowtown, not that far from Queenstown, and I had never heard of Ice Hockey until I saw Mighty Ducks, and even then I didn’t know it could be played in New Zealand. It seems to me that promoting seems to focus on the schools closest to the rinks, but most of them already know about it anyway because they’re so close. I have several suggestions, One: Someone sends an email out to all primary and secondary schools that are within maybe half an hours drive of rinks that you can play hockey on. Invite them to come and have a go at the game, maybe put on a day where the kids can come and meet some of the guys who play at the top level and watch them play. Teach them a bit about the game and let them have a go. I remember them doing that with rugby when I was at school. My second suggestion is that you send a few people out around the schools to tell them about the sport. If I had heard about Ice Hockey when I was a kid, I would have started playing years ago!
Just an idea
” title=”Grin” />I can’t speak for other areas, but I’ve long been of the opinion that Dunedin needs to build a solid senior league setup. With a large base of senior aged players (18+) it provides a simple stepping stone from the Junior ranks up into the higher levels. Players who are good enough, move to the NZIHL, others move to a lower ranked league.
And the younger age group teams could compete in the senior league itself for training purposes. Admittedly that didn’t work well with the Junior team this year, but that was because that particular team contains a bunch of spoilt brats, fortunately most teams aren’t that immature.
At the moment Dunedin doesn’t have a very well structured senior competition and usually only one grade, plus it’s treated as a VERY unserious competition and teams aren’t encouraged to enter which leads to less organisation within the league (organised teams leads to less work for the organisers).
If there’s a big pool of players, there will always be enough players for practices to be organised. There will also be extra games organised by the teams and there will be more players available to help pool together to form travelling teams. Plus with more grades there is a simple stepping stone up the ladder as players progress.
The Christchurch SNC has a nice system running and I think that is a system that other regions (and other grades) should be following.
More recruitment of U13’s would be a good idea to IMO. 100+ U13’s would be awesome. Even if only 20% of them kept playing, that would still mean there were 20 kick butt adult players in a decades time. Getting those 100+ U13’s of course would not be easy and I don’t have any ideas on how to improve that situation.
Getting those 100+ U13s is exactly what I was talking about with the open day kind of thing. If there was someone to organise it I don’t see why it wouldn’t work? I would do it myself but it probably needs to happen just before the start of next season, by which time I will be in Canada. Plus I don’t really have the contacts for it.
so backtracking on the ideas which are good starts, how do we get it going? Do we need to just promote the game regionally or do we need nzihf involved? I concerned with the who as much as the what. Awesome ideas become dusty without a person with vision and a drive to work towards it.
I think finding ways to encourage new organisers will help. The DIHA has made massive strides with removing their bureaucracy this year and I suspect some of the other regions would be wise to do the same.
Providing structured systems to help organisers settle in would help a lot too.
When I suggest someone organises a new competition I always get the same questions of “I have no idea how. Who do I ask? What do I need to do?” etc. and there is next to know documentation about this sort of thing other than some posts which Kyle and I have posted on here on occasion, most of which were directed at specific people.
If each region had set documentation (which was maintained and accurate) which outlined various procedures, then anyone interested in becoming involved could simply read through the docs to find out what needs to be done, how complex the process is and how to go about setting things up.
Of course that requires someone to do the documenting … which goes back to the lack of organisers problem, so it’s a circular problem
” title=”Tongue” />The government recently announced they are putting in 82million into school sports . Of that 37m will be distributed directly to organisations who will run sports programs for kids. Ice Sports Dunedin structure is well placed to apply for this funding and organise kids programs through schools . Other centres will have bigger hurdles because the rinks are privately owned but the opportunity is there to put together a program and apply for funding to run it through a club structure. The funding body is called Kiwisport and allocation in Dunedin will be via sport Otago I think. Just need someone to put together a coherent program via a sports body and someone can get a job teaching ice hockey to kids.
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