How do I keep juniors engaged without lowering my standards?

Tin Matkovic's formula is equal care, different demands. Everybody gets the same attention and the same coaching point, but what you ask of each player differs, so the strongest are still stretched and the newest can see a way to catch up. He runs one drill across several ability groups rather than splitting the squad, and offers extra work rather than assigning it. Standards can also be held in things unrelated to hockey, like Jon Bleby's no phones at team meals.

Should I deselect young players who are not keeping up?

Mark Bateman of England under 18s would rather make errors including players than excluding them, because young players often do not yet know what they do not know. He describes a pathway where players can come in and out repeatedly. Where deselection is unavoidable, Tin Matkovic's rule is to make sure the player still has a comparable environment to grow in afterwards. David Passmore adds that junior results rarely predict where a player ends up.

When do clubs lose junior hockey players?

Fede Tanuscio names the move from the small pitch to the full pitch as the point where clubs lose most children, though he offers it as his own observation rather than as data. His answer is patience with a realistic timescale, three to six months for players to stop being overwhelmed by the space, and coaching by question rather than correction. No coach in The Hockey Site archive quotes a dropout statistic, and the figures that circulate elsewhere are rarely sourced.

How do I keep juniors coming back without letting the standards slide?

Quick answer. The choice between keeping them and pushing them is mostly a false one. The coaches here hold the standard in the demands they make of each player, not in who gets to stay: equal care, different demands. They keep the door open in both directions rather than deselecting, they bias towards including a player and being wrong rather than excluding one, and they cap how much they ask of a young group at any one time so the standard is reachable. And they watch the moments where clubs actually lose children, which is less about a hard session and more about a transition nobody prepared them for.

That is the short version. Here is what the coaches say.

The formula that solves the question. Tin Matkovic puts it in four words in Balancing Skill Gaps: “equal care, different demands is also really important. So equal care is that we want to make sure that everybody feels special in the trainings, and different demands is that we touch the best player so that they can still improve, and we can touch the new players so that they can still find a glimpse of catching up for the level that we are.” The standard does not drop. It just stops being the same standard for everyone in the room.

How that looks in a session. Matkovic runs one drill across four ability groups rather than splitting the squad: “on the left side, they will do exactly the same drill, but maybe the intensity will not be that good”, and the coaching point stays the same for all of them. “You created one drill that fits for four groups.” Where he does want to stretch the strongest, he offers rather than assigns: “you can find this additional stuff that you would like to do with groups and then offer it only to the players that are able to do it, or maybe are super motivated to do it.” He is realistic about who takes it up: “maybe some people are just committed to two times a week and they will not feel that this third additional training is for them.”

Bias towards including and being wrong. Mark Bateman, who coaches England’s under 18s, gives the sharpest line on this: “we’d rather include people and make errors including them than make errors excluding them.” His reasoning is about what a young player can even know about themselves yet: “we can’t be deselecting people at our age because at times they don’t know what they don’t know. So it’s about trying to help them understand that, so they’ve got a better self-awareness of it.”

Make the door swing both ways. Bateman describes the change in the England pathway as exactly that: “you can come in, you can come out, you can come in, you can come out, as opposed to maybe what it might have been in previous years”, along with an open door for players with no access to a talent academy. A player who knows they can come back is a very different proposition from one who has been told no.

When you do have to deselect, protect what happens next. Matkovic’s rule is about the environment rather than the conversation: “if it’s a permanent selection, then I suggest that you make sure that the individual that is not selected has the same, or basically a little bit less, but still the same environment to grow after he’s been put out of the selection.” He also points out that how hard this lands is cultural: some children have been selected and deselected all the way through, and for others “it’s a drama process”.

Junior results tell you almost nothing anyway. David Passmore makes the case in A research based approach to talent development: “when kids are under 8, under 10, under 12, under 14, their success actually will rarely have a direct term effect on where they end up.” He goes further, and argues the bumps are part of it: “as much as we want kids to progress nice and smoothly up a hill, the reality is not only are there obstacles that they face, deselection, not getting the right support, not getting the right coaching, being injured. Actually what’s proven is that we need to put those bumps in the road, we need to give them a rocky pathway and challenges as coaches, because down the line that’s going to make them better players.”

The line that joins enjoyment to staying. Passmore’s version of the parents’ conversation is the clearest statement of the whole idea: “don’t judge me on where you are now, judge me on where your kids end up. Do they enjoy hockey enough? If they’re going to be good, they’re more likely to stay in it, and then do they go on to play representative when they’re older?” That is not a soft position. Enjoyment is the mechanism by which anybody is still there to get good.

Hold the standard somewhere cheap. Jon Bleby, who runs GB’s elite development programme, gives an example that costs nothing and is not about hockey at all: “we don’t have any phones when we’re having team meals, and even just that one simple little standard, it just makes such an incredible difference.” Standards do not have to be enforced through selection.

Cap what you ask for. Fede Tanuscio puts a hard limit on how much a young team can carry in How to transfer key hockey principles when kids switch to full pitches: “we cannot have, from under 9, 20 principles. That’s not good.” His working number for under 12 is two principles with the ball and two without, adding roughly two more per age band. A standard nobody can hold in their head is not a standard, it is noise.

And watch the transition, because that is where they go. Tanuscio names the moment, and hedges it honestly as his own observation: “it’s also where they lost, I don’t know if I’m wrong, but this was where they lose more kids, the transition from the small pitch to the big pitch.” His advice is patience with a real timescale attached, three to six months before players stop being lost in the space, and questions rather than corrections: “always asking questions. And the kids, they always said, yeah, because I see that one free. Okay, but do you think it’s dangerous, that?”

Getting a switched-off child back. Lisa Letchford has the most immediately usable tactic on this page, from Basic skills through Small Sided Games: “every kid wants to impress and wants to feel like you’re watching and listening. I would say the next time that you see something even small positive in what they’re trying to do, jump on it immediately and recognise it. And I reckon you’ll get them listening the next time that they come in.” She also defends mixed ability on developmental grounds up to about under 14, and keeps sessions to “40 minutes to an hour”, with about twenty minutes as the ceiling on any one game.

Two honest limits on this page. First, nobody on this site quotes a dropout statistic, and the numbers that circulate about children leaving sport are rarely sourced, so we are not going to repeat one. Second, and more interesting, none of these coaches has treated retention as a separate problem from enjoyment. They assert the link and move on. If your club is losing children at a particular age, you are probably ahead of the published thinking and the useful data is your own registration list.

None of this is a policy. What these coaches give you is a way of holding a line without using selection to do it, and a few places to look when children stop coming. Watch the sessions in full, take what fits your club, and check who did not come back after the pitch got bigger.