Swiss Hockey: Where we are and where we go

First of all: Congratulations to the HCD. They did carry the Swiss hockey-torch in the Champions-League and played very well, impressive fast paced transition-hockey! Also in the semifinal where Davos was more unlucky than really bad but to be fair: Davos had some lucky bounces in the quarterfinal and so we shouldn’t blame bad luck for the brutal loss vs Frölunda.

But the HCD is not my point, the HCD is the exception to the rule. My first impressions from September 15 got confirmed with what happened since then. The Champions Hockey League (the league who is missing teams from the two very best leagues in the world, the NHL and KHL) is easily dominated by Finnish/Swedish teams and this despite the Swedish league is missing close to 200 players playing abroad and in Finnland it’s more than 100 plus they have significant smaller budgets than our teams… and they are still dominant in this competition… Our U18- and U20-teams got washed up from world class teams in the recent Christmas-competitions and the future looks definitely not so bright. I’m a bit worried about the average level of our 98 and 99 born age-groups. There are much more tight fights vs Denmark, Germany and Latvia on the horizon than semifinals vs the very best: This is the reality at this point and the most probable reality for the near future and I hope you are all with me if I tell: This is not good enough.

Finland did widen the gap between them and us quite a lot recently 

FIN again World-Champions U20!

and the US, CAN, SWE and partly also RUS are clearly two steps ahead of us anyway. On the other end, the pressure of countries like LAT and DEN is growing, also GER, BLR, NOR are positioning themselves in our lee and are just waiting for a SUI sidestep to overtake us. We definitely can’t be happy with this. We have to be proud enough to just not accept this position in the international hockey-world. We should try to do everything possible and impossible to improve. It starts with the amount of kids learning to play hockey. We have to intensify these efforts, we have to produce emotional and soul-touching campaigns and we need famous story-tellers and ambassadors of our great sport, the sport of hockey! Yes, I know, we don’t have posterboys yet in the mold of Jari Kurri, Teemu Selanne or Peter Forsberg but still… we could easily build great stories about our first real NHL-star player Roman Josi and about the silver medal winning team at the World Championship in 2013. We need to sell our sport better and we have the best reasons for that because hockey is the best team-sport ever! The smell in the locker-rooms, the dynamic and speed of the game, the sound of powerful ice-skating, the tears, the sweat, the celebrations, enforcers and geniuses, soft hands and booming slapshots, crazy goalies, warm-hearted fans, ice-cold scorers plus creative and funny journalists. All this is hockey and much more, priceless! All kids should try playing hockey, we want you and you’ll find a great schooling for life and unparalleled adventures.

After done that we also have to discuss what to do better with the kids who play hockey. Our hockey-education is already on a high level but we still have to improve. We need the ambition to become not just good but the best, we need the ambition to develop not just a good hockey-program but the best. We need the ambition to educate not just good hockey-coaches but the best. Let’s go for it. Let’s grab for the best programs, let’s dig for the best hockey-teachers because our already good coaches deserve to learn from the very best and our kids deserve to learn from the latest findings in hockey-training, deserve to get state of the art hockey-teaching.

What I notice in Swiss hockey is that we managed to develop much more good players compared to the past. This did lead to the fact that we have now much better players in third and fourth units in the league A und much better competition in den league B. But what is still missing – compared to the world-class-hockey-countries – are high-end players. Approx. 20 players who can compete with the very best in the world and this means if we play them we win three out of 10 games and tie a couple of them. Finland is on this level now and we need the ambition to become as good as Finland, this is not unrealistic in the long term. Unfortunately this is a loooooong and winding road and the one promising instrument what was in the pipeline (the Academy in Winterthur for the very best talents) unfortunately did fade away, what a pity! 

The US NDTP-Program - we need something like that!

Believe me or not: We need such a program, we need to develop star-players and I mean NHL star-players. Compared with other countries I guess we have the infrastructure and the financial potential to implement such a program what develops high-end players year by year. Let’s come together and reach for the stars and we will have stars, NHL stars, world-class hockey-players! Who joins me on this road? The road starts with telling where we are and where we want to go. We have to tell this again and again… again and again. How to eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Horgen, 15^th January 2016 / Thomas Roost