Well this thread is once again a ray of sunshine.
There's lots of positives in Slovak hockey, but that never gets brought up. It's all blah blah federation, incompetence, not enough money.
Give us all a list, please.
I mean sure, there might be some clubs or individuals who make an effort and who work well, brining new ideas and so on, but there's no official coordinated effort to apply this throughout Slovak hockey at the moment. * Believing otherwise seems like lying to yourself to me.
I'm not counting Lintner and co., because as much as the fans love them, they are still very far from being in the position of power.
I think U20 team in domestic league is a great project which brought up some good results.
In some point there will be generation change in federation - sooner or later, probably later - and players who saw the world, have experience will take over old boys who know only commie way of work.
It's brought results, but what matters in the end isn't what place the u20 or the u18 finish at, but what kind of players those players become once they're done there. The earlier we understand that and move from the focus of just developing the system the players play in order to achieve results towards improving the individual skills of the players, the sooner Slovak hockey can move forward.
There have been some players who have played at the u18/u20 Worlds and who have become quality senior players, but most of them have preciously little to do with the u20/u18 teams. There are some exceptions like Marincin, J. Hudacek or Daloga, but all of them have only played like 20-30 games one season for the team, so they development most likely came before or after those short stint.
It's even more dire when you look at the forwards. Most of the ones that belonged to the best forwards on the u20 team over the years have disappeared into obscurity and plenty of them struggle to even be good players in the Slovak Extraliga. Just look where players like Rusnak, Duris, Konecny, Caladi, Uhnak, Mertel or Gaspar are today.
Of course there are always some exceptions, but once again we are mostly talking about players who have spent at most 30 games with the project inbetween playing for Slovak men's or foreign teams.
I'd rather say just focus singlemindedly on kids. The only nation to really jump in standings in the last 50 years is Finland - in the 60's we had like one indoor ice rink. In 74 - 12, in 82 - 32.
The secret sauce was to systematically work on the unglamorous aspects of the system - juniors, skating, stickhandling, skills - even if they all go abroad at 18, soon enough you'll have a national team of heroe's and enough not-good enoughs to raise the level of your league significantly. As the nation team starts getting success sponsors come etc.
And you will have a steady stream of enough kids to work with as long as you are in the top flight - Slovak fans are passionate about ice hockey, those fans have kids.
In Spring of 2003 the kid's were born who were conceived hours after Peter Bondra's gold winning goal - those kid's are now 12.
We don't talk about a single 12 year old here at HFBoards, that means that all is not lost - even if they are just average kids, if you double down on them in 6 years you will start to have a steady assembly line of national team players.
And who knows, maybe one of those kid's will score the next gold medal winning goal.
Maybe start focusing on them, give the 14,13,12,11,10 year olds more ice time, cut from the over 18 year olds who don't seem to be good enough and just wait patiently.
Everyone knows that you have to start with the kids if you want to move forward, but you have to get them to play first. Slovakia has around 60 ice-rinks right now, which might be still significantly less than Finland, but even at many of those the clubs struggle to get enough kids to play. But that's once again perhaps a question about marketing or about selling Slovak hockey as a good product, to paraphrase Lintner's words a bit. But that's hard to do with people like Siroky being directly involved in it.
To me, it often seems that our players simply stop to follow coach tactics over time and switch to - I will play whatever I want...Like they always stop to respect coach authority over time...
hockey anthem for Team Slovakia 
