COVID-19, Virtual School, Face Coverings, Social Distancing, Contact Tracing, Work from Home, Zoom…. all terms we have become all to intimately familiar with as parents and employees. Terms I hope will not become the norm much longer. Until that day, we must live with them and do our part to allow normalcy to return.

As hockey coaches, many of those same terms apply to how we must approach this current hockey season. The good news: we have been doing it for several months in a variety of ways on and off the ice. Let me share a few other terms with you: Fun, Development, Off-Ice Training, Coachable, Hockey IQ, ADM, LTAD, Teamwork, Puck Support, Game-Like, Decision Making, Speed and Quickness, Passion, etc. Terms I hope are and will always be the norm for our coaches and players. Pandemic or not, these terms (and many others) should be taught and encouraged always.

Keyshawn Hunter, a senior football player at H.D. Woodson High School in Washington D.C., feels hopeless during the coronavirus pandemic.

A couple relatives died from COVID-19, so Hunter avoids seeing elderly family members and hopes he doesn’t get sick too. He won’t join friends at Black Lives Matter protests in Washington D.C., because he doesn’t feel comfortable with that yet. Lately, he can’t even walk around outside at certain times because of city curfews.

This should have been an exciting time for Hunter, who plans to play college football in the fall at Old Dominion University. It’s unclear when he will report to school – maybe sometime in July – and he hasn’t been in a gym lifting weights for a while due to COVID-19 restrictions.

“Now what do I do?” Hunter said. “That was just a waste of time. I did all this work for nothing and now have to start all over from ground zero. It’s just feeling lost.”

14 minutes full of stories, the ride home, videos, and ideas as John O'Sullivan remembers when youth sports was about children competing with other children instead of adults competing with each other through their kids.

Following nearly three decades as a soccer player and coach, O'Sullivan began working to reshape youth sports and inspire a major shift in culture. After serving as a youth coach for the Portland Timbers in Bend, he founded the Changing the Game Project and is now an international speaker and national best-selling author of Changing the Game: The Parents Guide to Raising Happy, High-Performing Athletes and Giving Youth Sports back to Our Kids. His writing has also been featured in the Huffington Post, Soccer America Magazine and The Soccer Wire.

The A Step aHead partners are excited to announce the 10th year of our program! We are proud of the work that has been done to educate our youth hockey community about sports safety and provide free baseline neurocognitive testing. We look forward to another 10 years of working to keep our athletes safe while they play the game they love. This year the free baseline testing will be offered through November 30, 2020. We will continue to offer the testing at select Athletico clinics. Please click here for additional information.

Recently, USA Hockey asked players, families, coaches, officials and volunteers to submit their questions regarding the upcoming 2020-21 season. After consulting with experts on the various topics of questions asked – including Dr. Michael Stuart from the Mayo Clinic, USA Hockey’s chief medical and safety officer, on the health and safety front – we’ve answered the most common questions and provided additional resources. Click button below to view article.