Imagine you’re coaching a young golfer who’s trying to make a living on the PGA Tour.  He’s driving it long and straight, but just not hitting it close — not making birdies, and not enough money to maintain his status on the tour. 

You’d probably tell him Ben Hogan stories and suggest he hit balls ‘til his hands bleed.   “The answer’s in the dirt,” Hogan would say.  “I don’t care if you started at dawn, you haven’t even begun to practice if there’s still some daylight.”

Actually, you could skip the stories and just accompany him to the range, because there isn’t a serious golfer in the world who needs the Hogan lesson.   In fact, if you want to see a look of amazement, tell them about this hockey tradition — the one where practice means doing only what your team does — a lot of systems, a couple shots, a quick skate and pack it in — no extra skill practice on your own.

If a young basketball player has all the tools but is missing outside shots — a tennis player lacking a killer serve — a pianist who is one tiny step from stardom — the solution would be the same.  Practice, practice, practice. 

Not in hockey.  If a player can skate like the wind, has great hands and a competitive mind to go with it, but he just can’t shoot, we label him a defensive forward or a playmaker who just can’t score — or better yet, we just send him to the minors.   There are no half-hour shooting sessions before and after team practice as there would be in basketball. 

In hockey, we just don’t practice skills very well — the way it’s done in other sports.   We have this self-defeating loyalty to previous labels like, “He just can’t shoot a puck,” or, “Goal-scorers are born, not developed.   They have a gift for scoring that just can’t be taught.”

I’ve got news for those who quote such labels.   It comes straight out of the Biology 101 textbook: there is nothing in our DNA that looks like a hockey stick.   We don’t inherit goal-scoring ability.

Hogan’s right.   We’re wrong.   The answer is practice. 

Actually, Scott Bjugstad’s right.   As a former goal-scorer himself in college and professional hockey, Scott learned the value of practice.   He runs summer camps to pass on the good news to kids who learn that the number of goals they will end up scoring in their lifetime has a much closer relationship to their practice habits than to their genetic makeup.

Ask Dino Ciccarelli.   With all due respect, there have been very few NHL’ers with fewer genetic gifts and more labels that would discourage a normal kid from having a Hall-of-Fame career.   But Dino wasn’t buying it.   His desire to score resulted in 608 NHL goals, and none by waltzing through the defense with brilliant skating and awesome moves. 

Dino was willing to take punishment to screen the goalkeeper, to score on rebounds, deflections and shots while being slashed, hooked and cross-checked.   When he had an opportunity from the slot, it wasn’t wasted with a loud blast off the glass.   He hit the target, because that’s what he did in his many hours of practice.

Watch any basketball team practice, and you’ll see that team drills are often interrupted for a few minutes of shooting practice — then back to team drills, and later some more shooting practice.   I guess they think shooting is important and can be improved.  Their genetic makeup — superstar or something less — doesn’t limit their practice.

In hockey, we could have a dozen targets on simple steel standards at every rink, kinda like those extra baskets in their round-ball gyms.   Every hockey team that uses the arena could quickly pull the targets on the ice, organize a pre-determined shooting routine for every station and kids could get in an extra hundred shots each practice.

We’d work on wrist shots, slap shots, deflections, rebounds, top-shelfers and one-timers.   There’d be a station or two for shots from awkward, uncomfortable positions — just like Kovalchuk did it when he was a kid. 

Here’s a wager.  I bet that girls could be just as good at one-timers as boys, but they never practice them.   One-timers are not limited by strength — just by timing and repetition.   Nor do the best girls (or boys for that matter) feel the need to practice them; they just stickhandle through the defense and deke the goalie — until they get on the Olympic team and play Canada.  Then they wish they would have had shooting practice as kids.

If we did have shooting targets at every Minnesota arena — if we interrupted our system-oriented practices with a few minutes of individual shooting — if the number of shots by each kid was not limited by the length of the lines waiting for goalies — if we no longer labeled kids, but taught them — maybe Minnesota could produce some NHL’ers who score 50 goals.

And Hogan would look down and say, “Those hockey coaches are catching on.”