AcademyThe RinkLog philosophy

How do you talk stats with your young player?

The golden rule: statistics get looked at cold, never in the car after the game. The ride home belongs to a single question: "did you have fun?". The numbers come later, at home, once the emotion has settled, and always as a trend, never as a verdict on a single game.

Progress, not pressure

The end goal is not for the parent to know the kid's numbers: it is for the kid to learn to read their own. A teenager who can say "my faceoff percentage is climbing because I changed my stance" has developed something more precious than any statistic: the ability to self-evaluate without self-destructing. It is a life skill disguised as a hockey board.

  • Show: the 5-game trend, personal records broken, the effort stat that is climbing
  • Keep quiet: comparisons with a named teammate, the isolated bad game, rankings
  • Say: "your shots have been climbing for a month, can you feel it?" or "a new shifts record!"
  • Avoid: "only one goal?", "your friend scored three", "you need to produce more"
  • Let the kid ask: the day they want to see their own curves, you have won

RinkLog measures and computes all of this automatically during your hockey, ball hockey and ringette games.

Try it for free

Read next

Progress, not pressureWhy no one gets left behind: the relative age effectWhich youth hockey stats to trackThe full RinkLog Academy