Special Delivery: Training Camp

Getting ready for the next NHL season – like most aspects of pro sports – has changed dramatically over the years. It was once organic, personal, and far from scientific. Depending on how historical you want to get, players worked their family farms, did construction, or picked up shifts in hometown factories during the summer. The manual labor served as strength training and the off-season paychecks filled the gap of the economic necessity.

Training camp was a place to get into ‘hockey shape,’ thus the grind of the olden days’ month-long camps that were most often held in a small community away from the NHL city. Coaches would put multiple groups through two or three on-ice sessions a day to “get the guys in shape.” Rest and recovery as necessary elements came along much later.

Then there would be barn-storming tours of split-squad games playing in junior rinks and remote markets without regular NHL access. By the final week of training camp, the teams would assemble in their home cities to drill down on the finer details in preparation of the schedule, finally, at hand.

Where we are today is where you’d expect – light years ahead in athlete preparedness. The expectation is that each player is in top physical condition upon arrival. As a result, guys invest in their off-season workouts, enlisting personal trainers, nutritionists, skating and skills coaches. There are mandated guidelines that teams must follow, limiting the time players spend at the facility. That timeframe includes any off-ice conditioning and testing.

There will only be two days of skating before the first pre-season game, so players must be ready to play at once. The NHL and NHLPA have further reduced the training camp/pre-season schedule to four games total. The net outcome is that camp is only ten days long.

Overall, it is tremendous progress for the Players, the Fans and the League. The lone element the old days fashioned better than today’s expedited affairs were the legendary stories. And the resulting lore is mostly a function of too much time with too little focus.

Epic fights – both on and off the ice. Pranks aplenty involving hotel room rearrangement, with the occasional TV hitting the street below. And maybe the occasional team building exercise in town.

No time now for such shenanigans. Yet, progress wasn’t necessarily linear. For proof, I will leave you with this: As part of off-ice camp conditioning, one team I played with thought introducing aerobics as an early morning warm-up was an innovative idea. After all, it was all the rage in the mid-80’s. Within 30 minutes of our aerobics work, most of the players would have preferred a third on-ice practice session instead.

By the next day, over half of our roster could barely walk due to shin splints suffered during the one and only spritely aerobics session. As a result, on-ice was just a single practice.

Personally, I was prepared. My summer training included multiple racquet sports – tennis, squash and badminton — trying to get some goaltender-related movements through the footwork needed. August always meant hours spent on the local high school track pushing myself through the paces of aerobic and anaerobic sets, depending on the day of the week. Not sophisticated or position-specific like today’s player regimens, but it was enough to avoid shin splints from an innocuous aerobics’ session.

In the end, though, no matter what era you reference, training camp and its conclusion always elicit the same reaction from players and fans alike: Excitement that the season is at hand.