What would be your immediate reaction to getting the hockey opportunity of a lifetime? Excitement? Fear? Both?

Last Thursday, Canadian Women’s National team goalie, Kim St. Pierre, got that opportunity when she joined the Montreal Canadiens on the ice for practice. And she took it all in stride.

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This “paralysis by analysis” is extremely common in girls hockey players. I always struggled with as a young player - my mind was always going a million miles an hour once I touched the puck, but my feet would stop moving entirely. I once read this great quote, “If your head ain’t helping, don’t use it.” A great idea in theory, but I still always had trouble turning my brain off and just playing.

The problem with thinking too much out on the ice is that instead of focusing on the one play you NEED to make at the very moment you touch the puck, you are distracted by 15 other possible moves that you COULD make. Most of the time, that first play you thought of is the right one. So how do we fix this problem that plagues so many girls hockey players?

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Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! I’ll save all the talk about nutrition for “Tasty Tuesday” tomorrow while I am recovering from too much turkey and stick with the “Mental Monday” theme for today since I got a great question from one of my players the other day that I really had to share:

“How do I play with players who have not fully developed their skills yet? There is a huge range of skill levels on my new girls’ hockey team and I am finding it hard not to lose my mind!”

I asked a few of the Olympic women’s hockey players that I have played with for the last 10 years about how they deal with this exact scenario. This is a particularly tough challenge for them since they are usually significantly more skilled than the other players they are skating with at the club team level and need to maintain their high-level of play so that they are effective when they go back to the National Team.

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Girls hockey players have one of the highest injury rates of all sports. And in the case of certain injuries, such as concussions, girls hockey injury rates are twice as high as boy’s hockey and three times as high as football. Which is pretty amazing considering that girls hockey doesn’t allow body checking.

Usually when we talk about dealing with injuries, we focus only on the physical side of recovery. I spent my entire high school and college career struggling through injuries, and I completely understand how tough it can be from a physical perspective.

But what about the mental side of injuries? How do can players stay focused and confident when they have an injury that might prevent them from playing for a long period of time?

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