Teach Your Children Well, Oilers Fans

By KURT LEAVINS

When the team you cheer for is on a losing streak, the resulting atmosphere provides ample opportunity to observe not only how the players respond to said adversity: We can also see how fans deal with it. We all have our own methods of coping with a 9-game losing skid, and for the most part, who am I to lecture you on yours? But one attitude out there does have me particularly troubled. I call it “Senior Hockey Mentality”.

Senior Hockey Mentality, or SHM, seems to raise its head frequently, these days, in Edmonton, and typically after a specific player will suffer through a bad stretch. Since he’s the current favorite whipping boy on the Angry Oiler Fan’s hit parade, I’ll use Justin Schultz as my example.

Don’t get me wrong: Justin Schultz has NOT been playing well. I don’t mean to insult your intelligence as to whether or not you can spot a player in a serious slump. He’s absolutely in one. No, my issue comes when I read how you would have Dallas Eakins “fix” him, by employing SHM strategies. Those include:

-“bag-skate him”.
-“staple him permanently to the bench”.
-“call him out in front of his peers”.
-“punish him”, by sending him to the press box, and/or various other things that may comprise a list of “consequences”.

I call these SHM strategies because they can work, usually in spite of themselves, with the less talented, and for coaches less than artful in their approaches. And don’t be offended if you are a senior hockey player. I was one, too. We played at that level for a reason guys, c’mon, surely you know that by now.

The art of teaching has come miles and miles since we were kids. We know so much more today about the human condition, than we did 20 or 30 years ago. We better understand ahow humans respond to various stimulus and triggers. So many of the methods that used to be employed in teaching have been disproven and quite rightly stricken from the classroom.

Thus, there are no more “straps”, no more “dunce caps”, or other comparable methods of punishment misguidedly disguised as “teaching”. Many of the innovations in today’s classrooms have been adopted by specialized programs in all fields, be they the advanced scholastic classes your child may attend, the elevated skills training sessions at your place of work, or by world-class athletics programs that help develop the next Olympians.

Most of the players on the Oilers roster are high achievers. Go ahead and joke, but the fact is the NHL is the best league in the world. Getting there is no easy feat, and most of the players in Edmonton would be on some other NHL team were they not somehow acquired by this organization.

High Achievers are individuals who have “that extra gear”, and I don’t just mean the physical tools required. They have a mental capacity for a specific task that you and I may not. It is an intricate web of DNA mapping, which demands a correspondingly sophisticated tool-kit of stimulus to maximize.

In this group, compromising the highest one-half of one per cent of the population, employing the archaic principles of SHM is akin to taking a hammer and chisel to your malfunctioning iPhone. It may make you feel better in the moment, but do you seriously think you’ll fix it with those tools?

Now, you may call that “coddling”. You may say that these millionaire athletes are nothing more than pampered babies who should just “suck it up already”, as you advocate one or more the methods listed above. Then, you pile on, by hurling insults at these players, either verbally or via social media.

Really?? Is that how you teach your kids? Will they be better at school if you belittle them? Will they exceed in Pee Wee if you exclude them? Do you expect them to become better citizens if you insult them in front of their peers? We don’t even treat prisoners like that anymore. No, I have news for you:

The world has changed, and those things have long since been proven not just ineffective, but often deeply damaging and the cause of various social ills in the very young people that are then expected to grow up and take our place as the leaders of tomorrow’s society.

Instead, today, a tremendous amount of time is spent on process, the values of following one, the advantages of encouragement within them, and the priceless impact which confidence and self-confidence has on it. Encouragement long ago replaced punishment as an accepted method of teaching.

There’s a reason why there are relatively few coaches left in the NHL who (with respect) operate like Ken Hitchcock and Randy Carlyle do, and why the likes of Scotty Bowman, who happens to be the winningest coach in the history of the league, have become the accepted norm.

It’s because they have figured out the science behind pushing just the right buttons of their high achievers at just the right time. Consequences, especially the most blunt-edged among them, are very carefully and strategically applied.

It’s why there are no teachers today, especially at a high level, educating your children with the antiquated methods of 1942.

It’s also why blunt instruments of SHM that may arguably work with the less talented don’t work with the sublimely so.