There’s a lot of buzz around hockey in Teslin right now. On Jan. 27, it will culminate with a full day of programming around the sport for the community’s minor hockey league.
That’s the date the Team Yukon U18 men’s hockey team will visit for a practice and a skills session that dovetails with the opening weekend session of an eight-week program led by First Assist.
First Assist is an Indigenous-run sports and education charity started by former NHL player John Chabot, said Lindsay Johnston, recreation manager with the Village of Teslin. Part of the program revolves around on-ice and dryland training, but a huge part of the program puts the focus on education, she said.
“Kids have to be at school in order to participate,” she told the News on Jan. 23. She said attendance records in Teslin aren’t great. The hope is that the First Assist program will be the driving force in helping bring that focus back to the classroom.
It does this partly by placing a coach in the school with kids, to help with gym classes for all grades.
She said First Assist coach Aleksandar Kolarić arrived in the community from Serbia over the weekend. He’s spent his first week getting to know the community because that’s part of the way First Assist operates — coaches tailor their programming to what the community needs.
In terms of on-ice logistics, one of the challenges for Teslin is that the minor hockey league is made up of 29 kids, ranging in age from five to 14.
Usually the whole league is on the ice at once, said Johnston. When coaches start breaking the kids up into specific age groups, they don’t have enough kids in each group to run drills properly.
The really young guys are doing well with their skating skills, she said, but training like this (which ranges anywhere from two to four times a week on ice for the next eight weeks) will work on game skills, such as positioning and strategy.
Having Kolarić’s experience as a high-level coach will help with that.
So will having Team Yukon visit.
Johnston said it was great timing when the team’s coach, Mike Tuton, got in touch about visiting for a skills workshop the same day as First Assist’s kickoff weekend.
The team, which is headed to the Arctic Winter Games (AWG) this March, wanted to travel to a community, partly as a bonding experience before the games, and partly to run some skills workshops with the kids there.
“Basically we wanted to get the kids out of town and teach them to give back,” said Tuton. At this point in his players’ hockey lives, he said there’s been a lot of sacrifice on behalf of their parents and families. The goal of the trip is to practice for the AWG, but also to give younger kids in other communities the chance to build their skills on the ice.
Zander Underhill is looking forward to the trip. The 17-year-old Team Yukon player has been coached by Tuton since he was six or seven. He said he’s most excited about showing the kids who come out that practice can be a good time.
“We’ll give them lot of feedback on what they’re doing and make it fun for them,” he said. “Lots of laughs out there, lots of good memories and lots of drills that are super fun.”
For him, that means he’s hoping for some one-on-one battle drills and some fast three-on-three plays.
Right now, Teslin is the only community the team is visiting, but if it’s a success, Tuton said it’s something they’d like to do elsewhere in the territory.
It would likely have to wait until spring though. February gets busy for the team, and then they go to Alaska for the AWG in March.
“I think we’re excited and I think we’re just really working on getting mentally prepared to get ready to go skate fast and play our style of game,” he said.
What is that style? Tuton said the team this year is one that digs hard. There’s no star line that makes or breaks a game. Instead, the team is built on everyone knowing their role and playing hard in those roles.
“We’re a hardworking team,” Tuton said. “We’re a blue-collar, bring-our-lunchboxes-and-go-to-work kind of team.”
That’s why they’ll spend the next few weeks practising on and off the ice, working on their bodies and minds.
Part of that includes learning about visualization — what does the night before the AWG games look like? What about the morning before? The trip to the rink? Once the teams gets in the dressing room?
It’s not new to work on this kind of thing as a hockey player, said Tuton, but it’s definitely something they work on more with boys in this age group of 15 to 17-year-olds.
“They’re growing into men and we try to incur as many life skills into the game as well,” he said.
Again, that approach makes for a nice symmetry with First Assist, which places a focus on goal-setting, health-education, school attendance and mental health, per the organization’s website.
Johnston said all events on Jan. 27 are open to the public.
The day will start with a Team Yukon practice. Then the Teslin league will share a soup and bannock lunch with the team before doing some skills sessions with the team and First Assist. Afterwards, Team Yukon will play Teslin’s adult hockey team.
Johnston said the rest of the First Assist programming is still in the planning, but it will include Kolarić working with the community’s coaches on coaching skills and, hopefully, inviting kids from other communities, including Watson Lake, to participate in some of the weekend events.
Contact Amy Kenny at amy.kenny@yukon-news.com