John U. Bacon

The Michigan women’s club hockey team beat the #1 ranked Michigan State women’s team twice down the stretch to finish second in the league, and earn a spot in the national tournament. Hats off to them.

Although I’ve coached high school boy’s hockey teams for almost a decade, a few years ago, I spent two years helping out the very same Michigan women’s hockey team – and I learned a lot more than they did.

It’s worth noting that I’m comparing only high school boys and college women, based solely on my observations of two hockey teams. Your mileage may vary.

My education started on day one. I dumped a bucket of pucks at center ice, grabbed one for myself, then stickhandled the puck around the rink. But something seemed strange, and it took me a while to figure out what it was.

When I coached boys hockey, I never even finished dumping the pucks before I heard the guys rocketing around the rink. They shot as high and hard as they could, trying to break the glass. So what if it costs a few hundred bucks and ruins practice? You do that, and you’re a locker room hero.

But at my first women’s practice, when I looked back, I saw the pucks just sitting there at center ice. The women skated around, waiting for me to say it was okay to take the pucks. “Um, it’s okay!”

When I blew the whistle to give the boys a new drill, they dove right in – and got it all wrong. When I told the women what to do, they would huddle to discuss the whole thing among themselves, up to a minute, but then they did it exactly right the first time.

The boys loved showing up the goalies by whizzing slap shots at their heads and making them look foolish. The women shot the puck right at the goalies’ pads, because that made the goalies happy, and that made the shooters happy – even while it drove us coaches crazy.

The boys loved shooting the puck, being the star, and dominating anybody they could. Getting them to pass the puck was the hard part.

The women loved passing the puck – and passing, and passing, and passing. And really, just passing. They didn’t want to be the star. They just wanted everyone to get along. And that would have been just lovely – except, if we wanted to win, somebody had to score. And that meant someone had to shoot!

How many women does it take to shoot the puck? Five. One to shoot the puck, and four to say it’s okay to shoot the puck.

We had to convince the women they were better than they thought they were. We had to convince the boys they were nowhere near as good as they thought.

When a boy had a birthday, none of his teammates or coaches knew about it, and no one really cared. But the women all knew each other’s birthdays, and told us when they were. The first time, we surrounded the birthday girl in a circle for a drill, then sang Happy Birthday instead. We thought we were pretty sensitive coaches.

Until, that is, I got to the locker room, which was decorated with streamers and posters. They had cake and pop and the birthday girl’s favorite music, and they all danced. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

When the boys had a conflict, one guy might swear at his teammate, and the teammate would swear back – and that was it. It was over. The women never swore at each other – so I gushed to the other assistant coach, a woman who had played at Harvard, about how great they all got along. She looked at me as if I had two heads. “Are you kidding?”

She then proceeded to pull out our white board to diagram the three major cliques on the team, drawing arrows between players who didn’t get along. I was flabbergasted, but then I protested that no one ever argued.

“That’s when they’re really mad,” she said, “and you better watch out!”

I learned to watch out.

But since then I’ve noticed one thing about my male friends who coach women’s sports: not one of them has ever gone back to coaching the boys.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

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