What dose it take to be a world champion?

To get back to the topic as originally posted, to be a champion... Chris Michael from the US Men's team sent this link out to our guys.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/sp...l?pagewanted=1

To some it up, practice perfecting technique so your body learns to fire in sync so that you maximize your effort into results. It's a long read but may just answer the question.

Duck
(Just more intellectual stuff for Tan)

To get back to the topic as originally posted, to be a champion... Chris Michael from the US Men's team sent this link out to our guys.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/sp...l?pagewanted=1

To some it up, practice perfecting technique so your body learns to fire in sync so that you maximize your effort into results. It's a long read but may just answer the question.

Duck
(Just more intellectual stuff for Tan)

while that article may be onto something, we have to be realistic.

talk of genetic superiority or mystical differences between different people is utterly, utterly irrelevant when we are talking about our little sport of hockey.

you can drone on about how different golfers have different stats in different countries but they are dealing with millions of people in their player-pools. we are talking a few thousand in ours, only hundreds in each isolated country, and the basic recipe for eventual success has to start with retaining knowledge and turning over a constant playerbase.

in countries where there are strong centers of hockey, those centers must retain their older players and coaches to pass the knowledge on, and keep play at a high level so young players coming through don't have to re-invent the wheel. there is far too much re-inventing of the wheel in this sport.

a large base makes for a higher pyramid... thats all there is to it. attention must be paid to retaining that knowledge AND transmitting it to young players. getting the players together and making them work in a national team can sometimes be very hard and EVERY country has it's own issues with this... it must be a symptom of a minority amateur sport lacking sponsorship appeal.

fundamentally i think the main problems are about getting strong concentrations of players together and keeping them together, at club level and in terms of squads and teams. the countries that can deal with their problems the best and come up with some form of workable balance must then have a big advantage over others.

i can't apologise enough for the length of that rant, but if you're still here, well done.

Sounds like you missed the point. It's not that people in one place are better than others or any other comparison like that. It has to do with the system of training your body to do it right so that your body can execute properly. Anyone can do it from any region of the world.

yeah, i do see that, but surely we all know that to improve at something you have to practice?

it's only a small step to go further and say you have to practice in the right way.

hey duck, that article did get me thinking off track, maybe you can answer this.

whats the main difficulties for the states team, are all your players spread out a long way, is it hard to get together to practice?

plus duck, i prefer to think of it as not missing the point but becoming creatively sidetracked. i do that a lot. i like to think it keeps things more interesting.

Yeah, we are spread out so it makes it more expensive and time consuming to get together. But that's not all, our pools suck. But wait, there's more... we generally don't start playing until we are in our 20s. That's right, so if it takes 10 years, as the article suggests, we are in our 30s and wearing out (trust me Liam, you'll start to feel it soon) before we are good enough to compete. And then we have issues with pool managers and potential lawsuits, and blah blah blah.

But we are working on making it better. We have a plan. Whether we execute it well or not we'll see in many years. But hopefully we get our Junior program up to one-tenth what you guys have done in NZ over the last 15 years.

Duck

And I like the creatively sidetracked angle. Seems I've had that disease for years but just needed a name for it.

Doug,
Eventually found some time to read the article…on the plane to London.
I agree with Liam...practicing with the correct technique should be a given.
The article however doesn’t address the thousands of people that practice all the time with the correct technique that just are no good.
I do agree though that practice, practice, practice (with the correct technique of course) is definitely one of the key points to becoming a great player.
Now which technique is the correct one to practice for us UWH players?

Tan

Oh man! I thought I already did the intellectual thing and was over it.

Sure you can say that practicing with the right technique is a given, but you can also say that about getting coaching, putting in time, experimenting with different sticks, fins, kicks, playing styles and whatever. Also that your head has to be right. So in a sense the whole premise for this thread is a useless question -- It's all given according to you and Liam.

As to your follow up question... the one that works for what you are trying to accomplish. And that will vary depending on you -- your build, your fitness, your strength, your quirky elbow joint, how high off the bottom you are when you try whatever it is you're trying, should I continue???

i think the point of the thread seemed to me to be, what exactly can tip the balance between a good team and a champion team? as there seems to be a lot of agreement that most teams are very close in terms of fitness and skill and strength etc at a world level, due to the application of all the "givens" that each country seems to be managing on the same sort of level.

it was never going to be a question that was easy to answer!