Skilled, but not Gritty
Photo courtesy of John Howe Photography
That picture up there is me after my last hockey fight ever. It was against a southpaw, and I hated fighting southpaws. Could never figure them out, never had my best fights against them.
What you can't see in that photo is that my nose is broken and pointing in the wrong direction.
I remember walking into the locker room, looking in the mirror, and seeing my nose in a different direction, so I went over to one of my teammates and asked him if he thought it was broken. He laughed at me and said, "Are you kidding me? Of course it's broken. Go look at it again."
I knew that year was probably my last one playing, and I wanted to feel as much of it as I could, pain included. So I went to our team doctor, a smaller, older lady, and asked her to straighten it out. She pulled out this sterile stainless steel tool, looked at me, and said, "Alright, this might hurt." Then she went to work, switching nostril to nostril, and got my nose as straight as it was going to get that night before I could have surgery at the end of the season to get it back to normal.
Lots of good memories from my playing days. But let's save the war stories for another time, because the reason I'm starting with that one is to talk about a skill that I keep hearing is missing at the higher levels of the game today……Grit.
Where My Grit Came From
My playing career happened because I had grit that not a lot of guys had. That came from both my mom and dad with immigrant backgrounds, working from a young age, no shortcuts. It got passed down to me and my 4 brothers.
Grit is the reason I played 6 years of pro hockey.
I figured it out as a 16-year-old in Junior B. I fought a much bigger 20-year-old and somehow won. That fight made me realize that if I wanted to keep moving up levels, that was the skill I was going to have to lean on, and it wasn't a skill that I was particularly excited to do. I was used to playing Bantam hockey, scoring a lot of goals as a D-man and having my way. But moving up from youth hockey to junior hockey, you need to find different ways to earn your playing time. For me, that was playing with grit — with and without my gloves on.
Grit Can Be Built
I recently read Angela Duckworth's book Grit.
In it, she wrote, "You can grow your grit from the inside out." It's not a personality trait you're born with or stuck without. It's trainable. And she breaks it down into four things gritty people actually have in common, interest, practice, purpose, and hope.
I'll be honest, as I read those four, all I could think about was hockey.
Interest: Does the kid actually love the game? Not the trophies or the social piece, but the game itself, the puck, the battles, the smell of the rink at 6am.
Practice: And not just any practice. Duckworth leans hard on what's called deliberate practice — working on what you're worst at, with full focus, with feedback, and refining little things over and over. That's not "skate around for an hour." That's reps on wall battles, body position, stick lane, contact point. The exact stuff coaches at the highest levels keep telling me is missing.
Purpose: Does the player understand they're playing for more than themselves? Teammates, family, the crest on the jersey. That's the stuff that gets a guy to go into the corner when his body is telling him not to.
Hope: Believing the next shift, the next rep, the next year, you can get better. That you can come back from a bad period or a bad game. Without that, grit dies.
The thing that gets me about her framework is that every single one of those four is something a coach can build in a player. That's the part that excites me.
We don't get to throw our hands up and say, "Some kids just have it and some don't." That's a cop-out. If interest is low, we make practices more engaging. If their practice habits are soft, we run sessions that demand focus and give real feedback. If they're playing for the wrong reasons, we talk to them about it. If they've lost hope, we coach them back.
Grit grows. We just have to coach it.
Grit Looks Different Today, But It's Still There
The game today is a long way from the game I played 13 years ago. I get that. But grit hasn't disappeared, it just shows up in different ways now.
One of my old coaches used to tell me, "You gotta play mean and clean." There is no reason that doesn't still apply.
Like I've written about before, 80% of the NHL game is played from the dots to the wall. Very little of it happens in the middle of the ice. So the gritty plays today look like:
Winning wall battles with proper body positioning.
Habitual shoulder checks before puck retrievals.
Placing the puck into an area that takes the defender's hands away when on the attack.
Stick in the proper lane to force the play down the wall, stick on puck before taking the body.
After talking with my friend who is a coach in the AHL, these are the plays coaches at the top level are craving.
"Just Work Harder" Isn't a Coaching Cue
It's easy to lump all of that under "hard work" and tell a player, "You just need to work harder."
The truth is there's a lot of technical stuff inside those gritty plays:
You have to know how your body feels when you make contact and push an opponent off the puck
You have to know the feeling of having your stick in the right lane and going stick-on-puck before the body
You have to rep these things so your brain remembers how to perform the skill under pressure
These are real, trainable skills. Not just attitude.
And like Duckworth said, this stuff can be built. It's on us as coaches to do the building.
Where That Leaves Us as Coaches
My coaching philosophy keeps evolving, and the more I talk to coaches working at the highest levels, the more I hear the same thing: players today are extremely skilled, but they're missing the skills to play the game with grit.
That's on us. Myself included. We have to be putting sessions on where the gritty skills are the focus and get repped out in the same way we'd rep a shot or an edge.
One Last Thing
If you want to watch the fight I was talking about, here's the link.
I was able to play my last two seasons in Kansas City for the Mavericks. That building was always sold out and rocking. I never did crowd gestures, but for some reason that night, I threw my hands in the air, and the crowd went wild.
That picture is who I am and what I represent. Child of God. Husband. Father. Son. Brother. Hockey Coach.
🥊 CHL Quad City vs. Missouri — Gabriel Boutin-Gagnon vs. Dave Simoes (2/2/13)
Thanks for reading.
David Simoes – DS3 Hockey Development