When you hear that there’s a coaches clinic coming up in Cochrane on the third weekend of September, you assume it’s for hockey coaches. That assumption is only partly accurate.
Stuart McLaren is the senior lead in program development at the Coaches Association of Ontario. He says that while there is a hockey instruction Level 1 component to the weekend, it’s not all about hockey.
“We work with 65 sports across Ontario, and we’re also running multi-sport courses, which are applicable to every sport,” he says.
Coaching is coaching, and McLaren says the theories that apply to running a team practice are the same, regardless of the game.
“So your warm-up, how are you going to structure it, what’s the goals that you’re going to get out of that practice and how you’re going to measure those things really apply to all sports, right?”