BATAVIA — Local hockey program coaches will be able to start using a new SMARTboard to show video from practice as a tool to help their players improve — thanks to a donation from the Batavia Rotary Club.
Batavia/Notre Dame United head coach Narc Staley said the Smart Board is a gift to the local youth hockey organization. The goal is for the coaches to get more comfortable with it and use it for analysis for players from high school down to the Mites.
The SMARTboard, which Staley and assistant coach John Kirkwood Tuesday at the ice arena during a Rotary meeting, will help the players on a technical level.
“How does your stride look? How’s your head position, your knee bend, your stick?” Staley said. “When they can see themselves, it’s a really impactful teaching tool than just to tell a kid, ‘You’ve got to bend your knees.’ This is something that, right after practice, coaches can come off the ice and say, ‘This is what I was talking about.’”
The coaches already do a lot of video analysis, Staley said. He said having the SMARTboard at the arena allows him and Kirkwood, if they’re working on the power play, forechecking or another aspect of the game, to bring players into the room where the board is and, in five minutes, say, “Guys, this is what it needs to look like. Go right back out on the ice and fix it.”
Staley said he and Kirkwood can film most of their practices with an iPad, then watch video on the SMARTboard.
“We might run the power play for a couple of minutes, bring them right off, let them watch, immediately, what they did — ‘Here’s where you can have more poise … Here’s where we need more movement.’ Then, they get back out on the ice,” he said. “It just speeds up that learning curve instead of waiting until two days later, when we can get together at the high school and they say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that.’”
Staley said the gift from Rotary was amazing.
“It’s obviously a pretty expensive piece of equipment, but it puts our local organizations and certainly our high school program, on par with anyone now, in terms of having technology and the ability to help these kids develop,” he said.
Staley said the equipment will be used by the youth hockey organization, by the Genesee Amateur Hockey Association and the Batavia Ramparts teams.
“There’s some training that needs to be done for some of the youth coaches in terms of learning how to use it,” he said. “John and I have taken about a month or so to get up to really get up to speed and get good at it. We want this used at the younger levels. We want this used with the Mites and the Squirts, all the way up.”
Kirkwood said he wanted to thank Batavia Rotary for providing this to the community.
“We see GAHA using it, we see the High School using it,” he said. “The biggest thing is the proximity to where we are for practice. You want to be able to bring the kids off the ice, come here, have a chat, show them some film and then get back out of there and utilize what they’ve just seen.”
Having the space to accommodate 24 or 25 people works really well, Kirkwood said.
Former Batavia Rotary President Marlin Salmon was there Tuesday for the event. He thanked a number of people who contributed to the SMARTboard project.
“A lot of people put a lot of work into this project and it’s going to really have a lot of impact, I think,” he said.
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