Slovak U18 has once again made it to world elite

For many years, Slovak National team U18 found it impossible to get back to the top. They just couldn’t go back to when Slovak hockey fought for the top positions. They weren’t able to take advantage of the unique skills of the young players and catapult them towards NHL entry drafts.

The change started last year when Norbert Javorčík became the coach. He surrounded himself with professionals from various fields and began to work systematically with the U18 team. Among other things, he focused much more on the mental development of the players and the whole team.

“I keep records of the physical state of players based on training and physical tests and thanks to SportMind diagnostics I can see also their level of mental maturity and readiness to train hard and play matches. Based on the diagnostics we know which areas we need to work on with each player and which position should each player in the team naturally take. Or how to properly motivate them,” says the Slovakia U18 National Team Coach.

 

Among the set targets of everyday work with athlete there was e.g.:

  • fighting the peer pressure
  • coping with success and failure
  • transforming the concept of “team cooperation” into practical activities
  • building healthy individual and team confidence
  • keeping the discipline * Our team was the most disciplined one in the world championship.

The first year of systematic work with the team of prospective youths has proved it was worth it. Hockey representation U18 had a perfect score on the local world championship, where they played Canada, Russia and Finland. In the course of the world championship, we worked very intensively to keep the mental condition of the players on a good level and to help them cope with difficult situations that the championship brought. The players delivered devoted performance and never stopped trying to improve. Slovak hockey youths have not had such a success like this year and Slovak Ice Hockey Association believes that we will succeed in bringing up successful generations of Slovak hockey.

For long term systematic development with a team use LOW TEAM LICENCE