Floorball – Example of a practice week

An example of a Mourinho practice week:
Monday – defense
Tuesday – transition to attack and attacking
Wednesday – attacking and transition to defense
Thursday – defense and transition from defense to attack
Friday – game tactics

Floorball skill practice drills

Mourinhos coaching and football practices mixes the best technical features from the Spanish La Liga, the best tactical skills from the Italian Serie A and the physics of the English Premiere league. This could be a good mix, right?

Mourinho has strict rules on shin pads on the football practices, since he uses condensed space in a lot of his drills to encourage competitive situations, aggression and speed in practice game situations.

Norway Structured Development and Clear Vision

The most impressive presentation during the coach training, was the Norwegian one. So good content and fantastic presentation by Roy Johansen (National team coach) and his colleague from Olympic coaching team.

Roy Johansen Norway Hockey
Roy Johansen to the left

Norway started their development by thinking of, what are the best teams / nations doing? What does the best hockey (floorball) player do, what skills do they have, and what skills are they masters of?

Then they continued with working with their own team identity, who are we? What can we be best in? What can we control? Can we chase the other team all over the rink?

As an output from this, Team Norway could get some answers and identify areas to focus on. The key area was the answer to the questions, What can we be best in? What can we control? We can be physically prepared.
Therefore they
– Created a physical training development stair, with defined levels of, what is world class.
– Started an “Ironman” competition for all players and teams, that is run before the season starts.
– Defined their way of playing hockey (floorball)
– Defined team values, or valuing words to describe wanted behavior within the team.
– Set goals short and long term

Team Norway Hockey, Victory over Latvia during World Championships 2012

“Extreme goals – Requires extreme process”
/Team Norway

To be continued…

Floorball is bigger than Ice Hockey in Denmark

I will continue with the learnings from the coaching training, I attended during the World Championships in hockey. Next up Denmark…

Per Bäckman the head coach of Denmarks national hockey team and Esben Nedermark GM Danish National Hockey Team started their presentation, with talking about how small sport hockey is in Denmark.

Danish hockey has:
– 4400 registered players
– 16 teams
– 24 indoor rinks

While there are:
– 5000 hockey officials/referees in Toronto
– 296818 licensed football players in Denmark
– 5800 badminton players in Denmark
and 6000 Floorball players : )

Still Denmark is in the highest division in hockey, I will altough also talk about Norway, they have done an impressive work, with small resources!

What have Denmark done then?

One of the focus areas have been to have short and quick attacks, if you have not scored after 15 seconds you can give the ball (puck) to the other team, like the Norwegian national football team manager “Drillo” Olsen once said.

The Danish team have also been working with tactic and the discipline to stick to it, teambuilding, social environment and technical skills (opposite to Norway). What they are not good in regarding the national team coaches, is the physical part, they are too weak. The hard practicing culture is not there…

About the future…

Regarding the future for Danish hockey, Per Bäckman was quite negative, “we are at the top now, we will not get better, and we will not get more players or rinks, we need to take care of what we have now and try to maintain that.”

Wrong attitude…

In my mind totally wrong attitude, you will always need development and try to recruit new players and develop the game, players and teams, the same goes for floorball. When you think you can not develop or are satisfied, you will start to roll down the hill you are climbing and be eliminated in the end!

Denmark hockey and floorball
Danish Hockey a good story (name of the presentation) – They have done a good work, but it will not last for so long, with the attitude I have described above…

“You have totally different view on game system and tactics than Sweden?”
“Yes, I can not understand, why you would chase another players on the ice for 60 minutes” /Per Bäckman

Game Tactics Sweden

In the International Coaching Education, during the World Championships in Sweden, we had the opportunity to listen to the Swedish National Hockey team coach, before each game.

“We want to play with full control (puck / ball possession) towards the offensive zone, and in the “zone” we try to go straight towards the goal, P1 goes in front of the goal and P2 seeks up the rebound area. We also try to stay in the way of the goalie and steer the shots. Other areas we focus on, are to “win the inside” in 1-1 situations. You can say that, the more skilled players you have the less we talk about how, it’s more about what.”

Roger Rönnberg Swedish National Team Ice Hockey Sweden

/Roger Rönnberg, Swedish National Team Coach in ice hockey

Floorball vs. Hockey from a coach perspective Part 3

Players coming from hockey to floorball are already on a very good level ragarding stickhandling and they are used to body contact, which is increasing in floorball, and the hockey players have also good “foot skills / foot work” from all different skating practices.

If you try to summarize what the two sports floorball and hockey can bring to ech other is;

Floorball to Hockey skills

– Stickhandling skills
– Early game understanding
– Passing skills

Hockey to Floorball skills

– Different type of stickhandling skills and practices
– New dimensions to the game understanding
– Strength and body contact
– Movement into the game

Common skills between floorball and hockey

– Passing
– Tactics
– Technical skills (like stickhandling)
– Game systems and set ups
– Shots

Hockey and floorball in cooperation

I personally and as a coach try to find the benefits between floorball and hockey instead of competition in the early ages. Floorball can develop hockey and hockey can develop floorball, you just need to have an open mind and co-operate and create contacts over these two sport borders, this will benefit both sports and the amount of players!

We can share the players and develop them together to be stars in either floorball or hockey in the end!