With many Academies or Prep Schools the focus is primarily game experience. These teams will participate in 80 games or more a season including numerous tournaments. A tremendous amount of money and time is spent on travel, hotel rooms, and tournament fees which otherwise could be spent on more ice time for skill development as well as on sports psychologists, boxing classes, and other specialists or specialized programs to help players improve. The converse is also true with many skill development programs that have no game component.

The Pursuit of Excellence offers a tremendous hockey development program teaching both skills and team concepts but combines it with game experience in tournaments and a very competitive minor hockey league. However, the game component is controlled so that the skill development ice time to game ice time ratio is still approximately 10 to 1 over the entire program.

The players acquire game experience in 2 ways:


The players will play approximately 50 games (including some spring tournaments) over the 10 months. Teams are made up from the groups in the program and they play games against each other. The level of play is extremely high because the majority of the players in the program are at a AAA level. These games are very high tempo and very competitive. However, there will be many differences from what is experienced in minor hockey.

1. Games are video taped and reviewed with the players in detail each week. We use state of the art software and hardware used by the NHL teams during the game, so we can mark all important aspects of the game. For example, we can mark power play, penalty kill, neutral zone forecheck, face offs, etc, so when we review the game, we can quickly bring up every teaching point we need.
2. Players and goaltenders can easily come in and look at their shifts or scoring chances against them.
3. Every game is fiercely competitive because we can adjust the teams as we need to. Therefore, no game is a blowout, which often may occur when playing organized hockey.
4. The coaches can control the game and the teams by using certain types of forecheck or systems and require the other team to respond to it. This makes it a much better teaching environment for the players.
5. Because a) the players know the games are videotaped and reviewed, and b) the players spend so much time together as a group, we find the games get very competitive.

The Pursuit program has a Midget AAA, Bantam AAA, and a Bantam AA team. All of these teams participate in a very competitive minor hockey league with teams from various parts of the interior of British Columbia, Canada. Not all of the players in our program make these teams. We have tryouts at the beginning of September when the program starts each year. We select 17 players and 2 goaltenders for each team. Often what occurs is that players not making one of the teams the first year in our program have improved so much the first year that they are able to make a team the second year.

Regardless, of whether a player makes a team or not, the minor hockey league game experience is still only one component of the overall program. The most significant improvements in each player's development come from the other components of the program.