American and Finnish Successes of the Czech Hockey Players Were Supported by Mental Training

Silver from Finland and bronze medal from the USA. These are the latest achievements of the Czech Ice Hockey U17, which Peter Haken’s charges bring home from the World Hockey Challenge in the USA and Five Nations in Finland. The medals were won by the Czech representatives after a long time; the last ones were collected in 2006. Now, the young ice-hockey players were led towards the medal success by the perfect leadership of their coach Petr Haken and the upward work of the support team with the mental training of the sportsmen.

Petr Haken started to cooperate with the SportMind team in June 2016. Mentoring is a relatively complicated task for the support team because the team is changing all the time during the season and it is together only at camps and during preparation for key tournaments. Thus, the coaches have little chance to influence the mentality of the players and have to concentrate on short periods of time when they are at the camp or the tournament.

Excellent cooperation with the support team brought the desired fruit

At the first camp, a team-wide diagnosis was conducted to identify the personality characteristics of the players as an initial step for starting the preparations for key tournaments of the season. The results showed that there is a need to teach the support team and, above all, the coaches to be able to help the team to win over stronger teams, such as Russia, Canada or the USA. “We have made a plan with the coaches on how to work with the team during preparation for important matches in camps and the U17 unofficial world championship,” says Šimonek, CEO of SportMind. He adds: “Finally, the excellent cooperation with the support team was proved when the team was ready to manage the key matches of the tournament and really turn their results during the tournament. “

Server hokej.cz aptly reported this surprising reversal during the unofficial world championship: “The Czech ice-hockey players U17 did not get any point in the basic group of the World Hockey Challenge, but in the key quarterfinal they perfectly surprised favoured Russia.”

Petr Haken, who appreciates the entire process of mental support, also adds to it: “SportMind allowed us to adapt quickly to the situation and the whole tournament. We started defeating teams that we could not even have got under pressure before. “

The Czech national U17 was still closer to the victory in Finland, where they finally went down to the Swedes in shootouts. Before that, however, they gave great performances and defeated teams such as the USA or Russia.