Played in a two hour league pickup yesterday. I spent most of the time trying to control the puck and pass, but scored four times. Two of them were rebounds that I snuck through little gaps, one of them came from a goalie deke, and one of them was a crazy solid lift that surprised me. Every one of them was on purpose.
In games, I feel rushed to shoot even when I’m not in a good position to do so, and many of my shots peter pathetically off my stick and into the goalie. Because yesterday was a pickup, I felt relaxed. I skated hard to be in position, but there was no pressure to score because nothing depended on it. I just took shots that were available, on rebounds or when there was no one around for a pass. They felt natural, not forced. They felt… easy.
So the trick to scoring a lot is to not really care about scoring?
You ever see the movie Three Wishes? (It’s great!)
The one with Patrick Swayze? I will add it to my list!
=So the trick to scoring a lot is to not really care about scoring?=
The sport in the movie is baseball, not hockey, but the idea is the same. A note of trivia if you do see the movie: The opposing team in the “big game” is really the US National Little League Team, as in the one that represents the US in the Little League World Series.
Lots of research on athletes and being in the “zone” and what it really means. (there was one where they wired Olympic target shooters to brain scan things and watched what happened when they took aim, can’t remember who did it, though) Most of what I’ve seen and read basically says that when a person begins whatever event they are trained for the brain kind of shuts off and the wave patterns generated look a lot like sleeping states. They aren’t “thinking” about making the shot, hitting a target, jumping over obstacles, etc., the brain just “handles” it. It’s partially muscle memory, partially back-of-the-brain controls and partially whatever voodoo athletes have that make them good at what they do. Thinking back on whatever few high-point events/moments I’ve participated in, I really can’t remember the actual attempt at whatever it was I was attempting, just the part before and after. Seems to me that if I start to think about what I’m doing, it just doesn’t work as well.
I feel that more on the mountain bike, when I’m focused on the trail going downhill. I haven’t figured out what being in the zone means in hockey; yesterday I was just having fun. There’s a lot to be said for feeling relaxed and carefree. It’s different from the zone, though. I wonder how they compare.
You are correct (at least in my experience) that “fun” and “the zone” are different. I’ve had fun in some activity while thinking about what I was doing the whole time, trying new ways of doing whatever I was doing, seeing what the effect was, etc. but the times that I was in the zone so to speak, it was more automatic and things just flowed without me really consciously intervening much. Hard to explain the difference (you just know it when you feel it I guess), but both require skill/practice, natural ability and a good dose of the voodoo.