Video: How to Prepare Clips for a Player Development Meeting

Sharing how I prepare and present development clips to coaches and players

Throughout the years, working as a player development analyst and video coach, I’ve had the opportunity to prepare many video meetings for coaches, but also run some of my own with different players ranging from high schoolers to Olympians.

Over time, I’ve developed some techniques to ensure that my presentations are as efficient as they can be in order to allow players and coaches to get the most value out of the meeting.

Today, I will be sharing some of the things I’ve learned to help me optimize the preparation of video meetings with players and coaches.

Quality over Quantity

Before running my first video meeting, which was for a women’s hockey team in the States, I didn’t really know where to start.

Having seen our former coach at McGill, Peter Smith, run many video meetings with players, I asked for his advice. Specifically, I wanted to know how many clips I should show during the meeting, which was expected to last around 10-15 minutes. His answer surprised me, as he told me to prepare between 10 and 12 clips.

Initially, I wanted to show around 5 clips, but following my discussion with Peter, I compromised and prepared 7 or 8 clips for the meeting. Without knowing it at the time, that became a rule of thumb that I still use today when preparing video meetings.

For any video meeting, I like to prepare no less than 3 and no more than 12 clips (7 on average), each with a length of 10 to 15 seconds.

In a recent episode of the Hockey IQ podcast hosted by Greg Revak, Tomas Pacina explained how he would focus his practices around 1 or 2 themes. His rationale was that he wanted his players to work on this one aspect and master it before moving on to something else.

Similar to that, in my video meetings, I usually cover 1 or maximum 2 topics. If I work over many months with a player or a coach, these 1 or 2 themes are usually recurring in every meeting or every 2 meetings so as to ensure that we cover this topic in depth. 

In turn, this also ensures that I don’t overload coaches and players with information. And by not scattering myself to talk about many different topics for too long, my explanations are generally clearer.

Positive Reinforcement

The first step in providing value from clips is selecting the right ones. But choosing the right clips may take time because it’s all about getting the details right.

Sometimes, I re-watch sequences 15 to 20 times before deciding to include them (or not) in a playlist. When re-watching sequences, I make sure that the clips actually illustrate the element I’m attempting to explain.

This may seem obvious, yet some clips may be deceiving at first glance. Even on video, hockey is a fast game and what you thought happened when watching a clip for the first time may not reflect what exactly happened, especially when put in context.

Context also plays a big part in my clip selection process. As a firm believer in positive reinforcement, I often like to illustrate and explain new concepts in a positive context.

Earlier this year, I was working with a young Swedish player on upper body stability and middle/dot lane drives. My goal was to help her be more efficient on the transition and recognize opportunities to go to the slot following successful entries.

To do so, I first showed her various clips separately illustrating the two concepts in positive situations (ending in repeatable goals or quality chances). I wasn’t expecting her to score every time she tried driving the net following a good transition sequence, but I wanted to show her that it could lead to good things.

Eventually, once I saw that she was improving both elements discussed above, I started incorporating them together in the clips to help her recognize habit stacking opportunities.

Moreover, as she was generating more and more offense, I was able to illustrate these concepts with clips of herself generating quality chances off the rush. With this, I wanted to positively reinforce the fact that her hard work was paying off.

Relevant Pedagogy

The idea discussed above is in line with what Pacina was mentioning in the podcast episode with Greg Revak. He explained that prior to practices, his players would watch clips illustrating the concepts that they were going to practice exemplified by some of the best in the world (e.g., players of the Tampa Bay Lightning) or themselves, as they developed these habits up to a point that they were able to incorporate them in a game setting.

But beyond giving examples of the best in the world, through my experience I discovered that it could be interesting to go beyond the use of template clips to illustrate hockey concepts. Analyzing how the best in the world do something might be interesting for us as hockey geeks, but every player has different interests.

As such, to make clips more memorable and captivate the interest of players in individual video sessions, I try to create a connection between clips and players by tailoring them to their preferences.

For example, I once worked with a player who was a massive fan of the Pittsburgh Penguins and had trouble accessing her outside edges.

With that in mind, I sent her Kris Letang clips multiple times during the year in order to visually break down the basic posture elements and the movement patterns she needed to work on to swiftly access her edges.

Presenting the Clips

After choosing the right clips, it’s finally time to present them. The video meetings I run are always as interactive as possible. Giving a voice to the coaches and players, hearing what they have to say and building off that to explain a clip is a powerful way of getting them more engaged in a video session.

Also, I try to avoid descriptive narration as much as possible. Limiting yourself to describing what’s happening in a clip doesn’t add much value. Going one step further can be achieved by explaining why players and coaches should care about this technical/tactical element: how can/will it help improve their game? In grad school, my professors used to call this the “so what?” factor.

Finally, spending the appropriate amount of time on each clip is important. Again, quality is more important than quantity. Video meetings are optimized when the person presenting the clips takes the time to show everything that there is to show in a clip without rambling. That’s why I usually spend 1.5 to 2.5 minutes, on average, explaining a clip to try to get the most value out of it before moving on.

Conclusion

As a player development analyst, with players, my job usually limits itself at the preparation and sometimes presentation of clips. However, conveying these ideas to skills coaches and being on the same page as them is also crucial to help them design specific drills tailored to a player’s developmental needs. This, in turn, allows players to incorporate these new movements into their game and make them their own, as Pacina likes to say.