In this episode of Puck Academy, host Jason Jacobs discusses player development with Jamie Rice, the head coach of men’s ice hockey at Babson College. Coach Rice shares his unconventional coaching philosophy, which focuses on creating game-like practice environments and fostering player autonomy. With 21 years at Babson, Rice has led the team to significant successes, including four ECAC East Tournament Championships. The conversation also touches on broader themes such as the pressures modern athletes and parents face, the balance between skill development and team dynamics, and the importance of resilience and failure in personal growth. Coach Rice underscores the need for a passion-led approach to both coaching and parenting, emphasizing that there's no one-size-fits-all path to success in hockey or life.
In this episode of Puck Academy, host Jason Jacobs interviews Jamie Rice, the head coach of Babson College's men's ice hockey team. Rice, a Babson alum and experienced coach, shares insights from his 21-year tenure, including his unconventional coaching methods that emphasize development, empowerment, and game-based learning over traditional drills. The discussion also explores broader themes of youth sports, parenting, and coaching philosophy, as well as the challenges facing modern college sports. Both enlightening and reflective, this episode provides a deep dive into what it takes to cultivate a successful and cohesive hockey program.
00:00 Introduction to Puck Academy
00:16 Meet Coach Jamie Rice
01:27 Coach Rice's Unique Coaching Philosophy
03:06 Personal Connections and Background
06:21 Growing Up in Newton
09:42 The Importance of Team and Sports
12:39 Goals and Aspirations
22:34 Recruitment and Team Building
26:54 Parenting and Youth Sports
47:15 Practice Philosophy and Methods
48:49 Self-Learning and Coaching Philosophy
49:40 Over-Coaching in Sports
50:15 Planning and Key Points in Practice
52:50 Influences and Inspirations
58:13 Challenges in Division One Hockey
01:06:48 Commitment to Player Development
01:12:40 Entrepreneurial Insights and Reflections
01:13:19 The Role of Individual Skill Development
01:30:03 Parental Influence and Societal Expectations
01:33:51 Final Thoughts and Reflections
[Jason Jacobs] (0:00 - 3:08)
Welcome to Puck Academy, a show about how hockey players grow on and off the ice. I'm Jason Jacobs, the host, and each week I talk with players, coaches, and experts shaping the future of player development. Today's guest is Jamie Rice, the Boxer Rice head men's ice hockey coach at Babson College.
Jamie is a 1990 graduate of Babson, and he's been coaching there for 21 years. Guiding the program to an overall record of 334, 175, and 48, or almost a 65% win percentage. During that time, he's also had four ECAC East Tournament Championships, the 2022 New England Hockey Conference Tournament title, and Coach Rice was selected as the ECAC East and New England Hockey Writers Association Coach of the Year in 2014 after leading the Beavers to a 22-5-2 mark and their second consecutive league tournament title.
Now, I was excited for this episode for a number of reasons. First, just an aside, I'm a Babson alum, and Coach Rice and I grew up in the same town, but that's just an aside. But more importantly, Coach Rice just seems to really care, to be really development-focused.
He's not hopped around. He's been at the same program for so long. He clearly loves it.
He's in this game for all the right reasons. And it's also fascinating because some of his views are pretty different. For example, in practices, he barely does any drills.
He doesn't like to say small area, but he does constraints-led games with smaller groups to foster environments that translate better to actual gameplay. He also really operates behind the scenes and lets the players drive the ship. And don't get me wrong, Coach Rice is there to tune and steer and guard rails and make sure that everything operates how it should.
But it really seems like he empowers his players to take ownership and build a self-reinforcing cycle to perpetuate the brand and the cohesiveness year after year after year. The program also seems to have an incredibly strong alumni network, not just of people a year or two earlier or a year or two after you, but across all levels of the program, it seems like Coach Rice has done a really nice job of keeping that group together. And it's fascinating to dig into his philosophies, how they came to be, how they've evolved since he first started coaching many years ago, and also just the changes that he's seeing, how those changes are affecting what's happening at the Division One level, and of course, what seeps down to the Division Three level, and not just what's happening to his left and his right, but which of those things Coach Rice is adapting to and which ones he's kind of willfully ignoring. At any rate, really fantastic discussion, and I hope you enjoy it.
Coach Rice, welcome to the show.
[Jamie Rice] (3:08 - 3:10)
Good morning. Thank you for having me.
[Jason Jacobs] (3:10 - 4:02)
Thank you for coming. Yeah, I've been trying to track you down for a little while, I think, for a bunch of reasons. One, I've listened to some other shows you've been on, and we're both from Newton.
I think in emails, it turns out, I think your sister worked at the sporting goods store. That was my first job ever when I was 14 years old. I grew up going to Dexter Hockey Camp in the summers, and there were a bunch of Babson players there.
And I'm wondering if—I'm sure there were people that you knew, because I'm like six or seven years younger than you, and so it's like, yeah, I'd just be surprised if you or people you knew weren't there. I mean, my son's been skating with you at some of the Coach Kanata stuff, and I'm just such a fan of your philosophies, what I've heard you talk about. Obviously, your track record speaks for itself, so I'm so grateful for you making the time to come on my little show.
[Jamie Rice] (4:03 - 4:14)
Well, I appreciate you having me. Certainly, Newton, hockey, and Dexter all tend to be fairly small worlds, so at some point, there certainly is an intersection for all of us.
[Jason Jacobs] (4:14 - 4:52)
It's crazy. And even now, I mean, so I grew up playing, and then after I hung up the skates partway through college, it kind of just became dormant, even though it was a huge part of my life growing up. And business and startups kind of took over for the role that hockey and athletics filled growing up with team and camaraderie and competition and all of that.
And then it was with my kids that it's kind of been reawakened. But when I look at the jerseys in the ranks, I recognize so many of the last names because they're like kids of people that I grew up playing with and against.
[Jamie Rice] (4:53 - 5:52)
I've been really fortunate to basically continuously be in a locker room since I was about six years old. I'm really blessed that way. But it is incredible the amount of intersection that you have from your youth, from your past, from people you've known, even if maybe you didn't play with somebody, a brother, a sister, a relative.
And I think it's one of the greatest things about sports is it's a great connector between people. And certainly, most of us wind up in a life outside of professional sports and even potentially outside of sports. But that connection with athletics, with teams, with having played against, with, or even watched someone else, it's always kind of a nice jumping off point in a relationship.
Say, hey, we have a little commonality. Back in 1978, you were on this Watertown squirt team, and I was on the Newton squirt team. And, oh, yeah, I kind of remember you.
You were number seven, weren't you? And so it's a great way to connect with people.
[Jason Jacobs] (5:53 - 6:21)
Typically, in these episodes, we start with history and journey into the sport and all that. And I feel like I know that stuff about you because I've listened to a bunch of other shows. And I'd like to cover new ground, and there's a bunch of things I'm dying to cover.
I feel like we should do some of that because listeners haven't had the same prep, but I definitely don't want that to be the whole episode. So do you want to just give kind of a quick overview of how you came up in the sport?
[Jamie Rice] (6:21 - 7:41)
Yeah, sure. I mean, I grew up in Newton. I was the youngest of five children.
I was the only hockey player in my family. My father and one of my sisters and my brother were basketball people. And I just kind of took to the game.
I had a babysitter on Tuesdays and Thursdays, John Butterworth, who was a great player in Newton. His mom was a skating school instructor, Boston skating club instructor. And I used to go to their house on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
And pretty simply, she told my mom and dad, you can either watch or you can skate. And so I started and off I went. Newton was a great sports town growing up.
Baseball was a huge part of my life. The little leagues in Newton, there were five of them. We had Ninja City Baseball League from 13 to 15, which had 12 or 14 teams.
We had a National League in baseball, which was 16 to 19, which was eight to 10 teams. There was the American Legion. There was certainly youth hockey, Pop Warner.
There was a lot of things going on. So it was just great. So I gravitated to kind of playing anything and everything I could.
I was truly a backyard kid. I remember, I don't know if this is, I think the Statue of Limitations is gone, but Woodland Country Club, I grew up kind of at the bottom of a hill from Woodland.
[Jason Jacobs] (7:41 - 7:49)
Wait a minute. I grew up right around the corner from there, right up Beacon, like a couple of side streets up Beacon off of Route 16 is where I grew up.
[Jamie Rice] (7:49 - 9:41)
Yeah. So I was right down from Woodland and I took the T markers. I took four blue ones and four white ones off of a hole there to make the end zone pylons.
So our backyard was a football field. It was a little league field. My godparents lived behind us and much to their chagrin, I tacked on netting onto the fence to make my own green monster.
My dad had friends who built nets for us. So kind of, we had a basketball hoop. I built goal posts to kick through.
I even tried to make one of those professional kind of ball holders. Anything that was in the basement or in the garage, I somehow put into a sport. And so it was just something I enjoyed.
I loved being around. I loved competing. I loved playing.
And some of the games were with neighbors, some with go play someplace else. I remember off of Auburndale Lab, a friend of mine, Tony Malloy, they had a median in the McAuliffe's and we used to play tackle football there. And so it really didn't matter to me.
I just loved playing and loved being outside and loved playing sports probably like most kids and skating at the Cove was a big part of my childhood. So it really didn't matter. I don't think I ever gravitated towards one really, but was happy to play them all and found my way into being a college athlete in baseball and hockey.
And then I was going to have an opportunity to teach or coach at Salisbury School or coach hockey at Colby. And I don't know why I chose just the senior hockey route, but I did. And here I am, 36 years later from graduation and about 52 years later from being a six-year-old running around at 20 Vista Ave in the backyard, taking the T markers from Woodland to make my eight end zone pylons.
[Jason Jacobs] (9:42 - 9:50)
Yeah. But I've heard you say that no matter when you see your players in life, they're still at the age they were in the locker room to you. I think we all feel that way.
Also about ourselves.
[Jamie Rice] (9:51 - 11:16)
Yeah. No, I'm the ultimate kid. I wear shorts to work six plus months a year.
I'm in the sandbox of life for sure. But I think it's one of the greatest things about sports, as I mentioned earlier, the connectivity, but also the relationships you have. You have shared memories, you have shared experiences, but you really do get to kind of tele-transport at a given point in time.
If I saw a teammate from Rivers where I went to high school or Lodgkis where I BG'd or Babson or youth hockey, or a young man that I've coached at one of my college stops along the way, it's always that moment in time when you interact with them. You're not really talking about politics or what's going on in the global economy. You're kind of talking about, hey, remember when we talked about Dexter hockey camp?
I can remember riding the bus to Dexter hockey camp with kids from Westwood because that was our bus route. And when I see them now, I do skills for Westwood on Thursday nights and have for 18 years. I've seen some of those fathers say, hey, I remember you.
I think you gave me a wedgie when I was nine years old on the back of the bus. So I think that's one of the greatest things that I've been fortunate being part of and being in athletics is the shared memories, but going back to that moment in time. And a lot of times, maybe because I haven't grown up, but people are always like, geez, I can't remember you remember that.
I'm like, oh yeah, I remember that. It left an imprint on me somewhere along the way.
[Jason Jacobs] (11:17 - 11:19)
Yeah, but then you don't remember what you had for breakfast today.
[Jamie Rice] (11:19 - 11:51)
It's weird how it works. I've told the story. We actually, two of them now, we just got a washing machine.
My family didn't have a washing machine for two and a half years. I was kind of oblivious to that. And I do the laundry.
So I would just go down to the laundromat. And there was a time where one year the light bulb was out in the refrigerator for four months. It just happened to coincide with November, December, January, and February, which tend to be a little bit of a tunnel for me.
And at the end of the year, I was like, geez, the light bulb's out. My kids are like, yeah, it's been out since November. Like, oh, all right, Dad will handle that.
[Jason Jacobs] (11:51 - 12:39)
One thing that struck me when I was preparing for this discussion is just how much joy you get from what you do and how even more than the wins and the losses, making sure that your players have memories and create friendships and have character and strong values and things like that. And you don't strike me as one to chase, yet you've achieved. I mean, your track record's insane.
So a question that comes to mind when I reconcile those two things is where do goals fit into all of this? How important are they? Are you a believer in goals?
Do you set goals for yourself? Or are you more kind of living in the moment and letting life unfold as it does?
[Jamie Rice] (12:39 - 16:33)
I certainly have goals. But I think culture, goals, process are all really overused words right now. And for good reason.
They have great value. I guess I just tried to be myself. And my passion was always being on a team.
My passion was always competing. And I think subliminally, I learned a lot of the lessons that I try to share without someone kind of beating them down on me. It sparked my interest in reading.
It sparked my interest in reading the types of books I read. It sparked my ability to think about, hey, these are things that I've carried with me for now 50 years, say from the time I was eight till 58 now, that I'm not sure anyone ever said, this is your goal. This is your culture.
This is your how you should act. This is your character. It was just being around a lot of really great people.
And I think taking a little bit of something from all of them and trying to emulate them in some ways and understanding what they were trying to do. I would say I was, I hope and believe I was always very coachable. I was always interested in being coached and how a team got put together.
But for me personally, our goal is very simply, we want to have the best year we can every year here at Babson. I don't know what that will look like. I don't know what it looks like in reverse.
I don't know what it looks like in ahead. I just know what it looks like today. And so today we'll try to put forth our best effort when we practice at 115.
And my job, my responsibility to the players and to this program is for me to be as prepared as I can for our practice to help them get the most out of it, to help them achieve whatever they want to do. But a specific goal for myself, like I really don't, I don't have any goal. I want to live a long, healthy life and grow up to see grandkids and things like that.
But I just want our program to be the best it can be every day. And I do want our players to have a lifelong connection to one another and to the program, I hope. And it'll be different for every single player.
There are some players who will go off and maybe they never reach back out to me and that's okay. It's not that, I hope it's not that they don't like me or I hope it's that they haven't enjoyed it, but life takes us on different directions and we get busy with a lot of different things. But I'm most satisfied by the number of people who do reach out.
And it could be somebody reaches out once in the last 10 years, but just that connection at one point. I mean, I think the, and I've talked about it in other podcasts or interviews, things of that nature. It's a real thrill when you get invited to a player's wedding, you know, because obviously you've had some dramatic impact on them.
Like, Hey, on my most special day at this moment of my life, we'd like you to share in it. But the ones who don't, I'm not regretful or, Oh, did I do something wrong? I understand that there's a limited number of guests and there's other things in their lives.
And maybe this was just a small piece of their entire journey. But my one overarching thing is I hope every player leaves with one thing over their four years that they've taken away from the program. That's going to help them somewhere in the next 40 years.
We give the guys a lot of articles and thoughts and quotes, and I have all sorts of stories that I try to share. And sometimes they're bizarre and they look at me like, you know, where is he going with this? But if everyone takes one thing after four, after their four years here, and somehow it helps them in their next 40, then I feel like we've done something successful.
But goals, aspirations, I want us to have a great day today. I want our program to be a lifelong connected memory and passion for them. And while we're here, certainly on Fridays and Saturdays, I want us to win.
[Jason Jacobs] (16:34 - 16:40)
You mentioned that that journey informs the books that you like to read. I'm just curious, what kind of books you like to read?
[Jamie Rice] (16:41 - 17:54)
I read a lot of leadership books. I read a lot of psychology books. I'm actually reading a book now about the development of boys, because it's certainly something that's in our wheelhouse and how they are, what they're faced with now.
We have a 23-year-old son, so I've seen a little bit, but I don't, even with him, I don't know everything. I haven't grown up in an era where what people post on social media about themselves or about me really has deep matters. So I try to learn stuff like that.
The one thing I do try to do now is mix in some fiction, because I found for a while, probably 25 years ago, I was reading so many leadership coaching self-help books that you kind of screw yourself up. It's hard to find your true north, because you can read one book that says leadership is X, another book says leadership is Y, another book says leadership is Z, and the fourth book says leadership isn't anything, it's followership. So how do you reconcile all that?
So I did find that I was just getting pulled in a lot of directions, so now I try to mix in a good fiction book for every two books I read, read a fiction book in there, and then go back to screw myself up.
[Jason Jacobs] (17:55 - 18:46)
You've talked before about your leadership style and how you, you didn't use these words, but what I took from it, and correct me if I get anything wrong, is that you try to fade into the background and let the players drive the bus, right? And what I'm curious about is there's a chicken and egg, right? Because if you're just coming in and you let the players drive the bus, but you're just getting going, they'll drive it right off a cliff, right?
But you've built up so much trust that is then self-reinforcing over the years, and it perpetuates because the system, you know, because there's always some players who've been there for, you know, who are ingrained in it there to help the new crew coming in, right? And then rinse, repeat. But how does that get going to begin with?
Because you can't do it that way to begin with.
[Jamie Rice] (18:46 - 22:34)
It's certainly something that has grown and evolved and probably changes a little bit every year. But at the outset for me is, you know, there's very little a coach can control once the game starts. Aside from who goes on the ice, and before that, who is going to participate in the game, you know, once the game goes, because it's a continuous, invasive, transitory game, they can't stop and say, hold on, coach, we didn't cover this on Tuesday, or you said that they would be doing X and they're not.
So I believe in my heart that, you know, Monday to Wednesday for me as a coach and for our coaches is when we try to instill what I would call the, you know, the 20,000 foot view, the foundational pieces of, hey, these are things we want to be good at. These are things we need to do to be successful. But within that, there's a thousand different ways, you know, and I think the trust in our players, one, I'm really fortunate to be at a school that attracts great kids from great families who are really smart.
So they can handle a lot, you know, they can be given a lot. But I think in general, you know, they have so much ability and they've been overcoached by the time they get to us. You know, I think like it's video replay, like if we have to slow something down and watch it for four minutes with 11 different views at 11,000 speed, that's not reality.
And it's very easy in hindsight to pick apart, hey, you didn't do this, or we didn't do this, or you should have done that. And the fact is in the games going on, it's not that easy. It's like Star Wars out there.
It's coming at them at light speed. And more so now than ever, our game is really fast, but I think any athletic event. So I always relate it to like someone who can hit the ball really well on a lesson at the driving range, and they get out on a golf course, and then it's completely different.
You know, the ball is not flat on a piece of AstroTurf in ideal conditions with a 50-yard wide netted, you know, range. It's a dogleg left. It's shorter, it's longer, it's windy, it's rainy.
You know, at the end of the day, can you get the clubhead square on the ball is all that matters. So I guess what we're trying to do Monday to Wednesday is when we get to Thursday, which that practice the players have complete ownership of other than the playlist, and Friday and Saturday, the games is can they get the clubhead square on the ball? And if they can't, can we make some adjustments, and we're not absconding coaching, but it really does belong to the players.
And, you know, you mentioned it, and one of the things that I really believe, and we just actually mentioned this to the team on Friday night, hockey players don't need coaches. Teams do. Teams need coaches because someone has to kind of direct shape, you know, get it going in the right direction.
Because if it was left to the players, I don't know if we'd go off the cliff, but they'd all put themselves on the power play, and they'd all take extra long shifts, and they'd all make the lineup based to their best knowledge. But the players, you know, to play hockey, to play the game in and of itself, to go to a pond today, to go to the cove or Bigelow, if they're open, you don't need a coach to go down and play. It's just when a team gets together, there needs to be some direction.
But the players ultimately are really the drivers of the team, and our job is a little bit like a sheepherder. It's occasionally to, you know, push it back in line a little bit to the right, or push it back in line a little bit to the left, or make sure that collectively everyone's going in the same direction. That's the real role and job of a coach, and to provide an environment that they feel comfortable in, you know, going out and playing.
Let it rip.
[Jason Jacobs] (22:35 - 22:59)
When you think about a crew that you can work with, it's not just about them trusting the system, it's about you trusting them. What are the things, when you think about constructing the team or recruiting, that they need to have coming in and that are uncompromisable, and what are the things that it's like, oh, I can work with that, like, they just don't know the system yet, and I can mold them once they're here?
[Jamie Rice] (23:00 - 26:53)
I think at the forefront, and it's two parallel train tracks, but kind of similar, we want great kids who have good ability. Like, I think people hear me say that, like, oh, he just wants great kids, and, you know, this kid's a great kid, but he's not a good player. Well, they've got to be, you know, at the minimum standard for athletic ability, but we want great kids who are good athletes, and then I want kids who really want to be at Babson.
Like, this is, it's hard to go to a school like Babson and do well academically, to have a social life, you know, to be able to afford it, to make the sacrifice you have to have, and I don't want to have, we don't want to have players who wish they were someplace else. Now, I want to go to BU. Like, when I was 18, I thought, you know, the 80 Olympics had happened, I grew up watching BU hockey, so I'm like, okay, you know, 88 or 92 Olympics, then pro hockey, and you know, I didn't know.
BU didn't want me, and I wanted Babson, so I realized that not everybody's going to fall out of the crib saying I want to go to Babson, but at the point where the reality is that they are a Division III hockey player, that they are a good enough student to get into a select college, that they want to play at the highest level, that's when I want their decision to be like, you know what, I want to be at Babson, I want everything that Babson has to offer.
So, being a great kid who has the necessary ability and then loves Babson and wants to be here, I think when you get those people in the same room, it's very easy to coach or to be a part of that group, and I don't think of myself as the leader of it, I'm a part of it. You know, I'm one of 33 people in our program this year. Our strength coach, our trainer, our 27 young men who make up the roster, our coaches, like, we're all one part of it, we're all one one-thirty-third of it.
So, being a part of it is more important than saying, I'm the leader of it, I'm the coach. Someone has to make some decisions. My sister makes decisions on where we eat, like, he's in charge of the food, and we collaboratively talk about who's going to play in a game and how much and where we're going to use them, but, you know, we're just a part of it, and we just try to uphold our end of the bargain and do the best we can with our part every day.
I think that's probably the hardest part for players to see, is that the coaches, or at least in our case, our coaches, we don't want to be, you know, we just won the championship of a tournament, in-season tournament on Oswego, and our coaches aren't in the picture, by design. Like, that's, we have championship photos of looking at them right now on our wall, and the coaches are in the back row. The players drive it.
We want to be a part of it, but I want them to know and believe and understand, and I hope they do, that we are investing. I'm going four months without a light bulb in the refrigerator because I'm thinking about Babson Hockey. So, when they get here every day, if they can understand my energy and my passion and our assistance energy and passion, the strength coach and the trainer, if they can feed off of that a little bit, because they have much more going on, they do have class, you know, my relationships are set, my three children and my wife, we've been a family for a long time, but they have girlfriends, and they have friendships, and they have class, and they have room selection, and they have housing selection, and they have everything else going on, and they have jobs and internships.
So, I hope that when they get here within that hour and a half or two hours, this can be the most important part, but for us as coaches, that's where we have to make the sacrifice and choose to and say, okay, aside from when we're sleeping and probably somewhere in my brain, it's still clicking, but we're going to do everything we can to put the program first. And so, if we get young men at the outset who are going to put the program first and want to be here, I think we have a good recipe.
[Jason Jacobs] (26:55 - 28:32)
One of the things I wrestle with as a parent, and I'm sure a bunch of listeners wrestle with it as well, both parents and players who, you know, aspire to have their kid or if they're the kid to play at a school like Babson is, you know, you want the best for your kid, and as the path gets harder, and it's not just sports, like, it feels like with globalization, and I mean, for a bunch of, you know, automation, and I mean, for a bunch of reasons, like, it just feels like there's, I don't know, I go back and forth with it.
Are we, you know, is this the best it's ever been? Or are there headwinds, you know, are the headwinds getting blowing harder, right? But at any rate, in hockey, at least for the US kids, seems like they're blowing harder, right?
So, it's like, oh, like, I want my kid should do this, my kid should do that, my kid should do this, like, if he or she wants to have any chance, like, you know, and then same thing with school, like, they need to do their homework, they need to, you know, follow this track, right? But actually, like, one of the most important things it feels as a parent is not what they do, but it's like, who they are, right? Or in the hockey world, it's, you know, it's not necessarily like, to your point about the driving range, it's not how their shot is, or, you know, how much they can bench press, but it's like, what's their compete level?
Like, like, what's the speed of their decision making? Like, how sound is their decision making? Like, you know, it's a lot more of these kind of intangible, their character, how are they as a teammate, right?
And so, how do you balance that as a, and this is more apparent question, but how do you balance the what you do with what you are?
[Jamie Rice] (28:32 - 36:10)
If I had that answer, I wouldn't be coaching Marquette Babson. First and foremost, I think that we all as adults kind of say, you know, back in our day, or this is how we did it, or this is how I grew up, or this is what, you know, I think we need to recognize what's going on in the world today. So a point in case would be, if 20 years ago, you had told me the best player in the United States offensively, and let's, for argument's sake, say it's Austin Matthews, was going to be a player of Mexican descent from Phoenix, Arizona, it would have been laughable.
So you talked about the pressures parents face. So when I played at Babson, my first two years here, we had two players from outside of Massachusetts. One was Warwick, Rhode Island, and one was Enfield, Connecticut, both essentially within real close proximity of Massachusetts.
You know, we've had captains from Florida, from Ohio, from North Carolina, from Washington, D.C. in my years here. So one of the things parents are faced with today is the game has grown, which is a great thing. It's fantastic.
But with that means that there's more kids playing. So when I grew up in the 70s and the 80s, trying to make my way through youth hockey, to prep school hockey, to college hockey, if you were from Massachusetts, Minnesota, Michigan, New England, New York, you had a shot. Because that's really all that was playing hockey.
There were some outliers, but not many. Now it's a global game. And certainly in our country for these kids, you know, when you look at going to a prep school, and let's say it's a boarding school, when I was a postgraduate at Hotchkiss, again, all of our kids were New England, New York.
I think we had a couple New Jersey. You know, now there's kids from Florida, from Georgia, from Illinois, which is not, you know, unpopulated, obviously. California could be Arizona.
So you're getting the effects of something completely out of your control. So if you are thinking about, well, hey, 15 years ago, Matt Boldy played for the South Shore Kings when he was eight. And that's how he got to the NHL.
Well, 15 years ago was even different than today. And Matt Boldy is an exceptional player with exceptional talent. But just because he wore that jersey doesn't mean that that's the path for every single kid.
Because there's also players on the Minnesota Wild who didn't play for the South Shore Kings. There's players at BC, at BU who didn't have the same path. And I look at our team, even kids, we have two seniors who both were at Deerfield together the year of COVID.
One's from North Carolina. One's from Milton, Mass. Completely different backgrounds.
But yet they're both here. One after Deerfield went to play in Alberta. One played locally junior hockey.
Different paths. They're both at Babson, and they both share an experience at Deerfield. But through Deerfield and after Deerfield, before getting to Babson, completely different.
So we cannot look back and say it used to be this way because it's completely different. We cannot look at other people and say, oh, so-and-so played at X team for Y coach, and he got to Z. If you look at someone like Matt Boldy or Jack Eichel, I always use Jack Eichel as an example.
You know, if you walk in almost any rink in eastern Massachusetts, they've got Jack Eichel shot here. He skated here. He trained with this guy.
He lifted with this guy. He played on this team. Jack Eichel deserves a lot of the credit for Jack Eichel being great.
And those people certainly helped him. But Jack Eichel had genetics, drive, ability, desire, passion, athleticism, whatever. He had a lot of those things, and those people all helped bring it out and certainly deserve some credit.
But Jack Eichel deserves the most credit. So a long way of getting to the point of I don't know how you get from A to B, and it's completely different for every family. And the thing that I would say to any parent having done...
So our three children went to three different schools because they were different fits for each of them. They all played youth hockey. None of them played hockey in college.
Two of them are college athletes. One graduated. One's current.
Neither of them in a sport that when they were eight or nine, they played at all. Neither of them for a sport at 13 that they maybe just got introduced to. One in field hockey and one in football.
Our other daughter played hockey all the way up and then wound up being a swimmer and a rower in high school. We taught them how to swim. All of our kids in our family we think you should be able to read, skate, and swim.
If you're a rice, those are the three things you got to have. But competitive swimming wasn't something that was on our radar. Rowing certainly wasn't on our radar and she chose not to pursue athletics in college.
But they all played something completely different than eight, nine, or 10. If I had said, oh, they're going to do X, Y, Z, that it's going to happen. So easy to say, enjoy the ride.
Let your kids learn. Make sure they learn how to read. Make sure they're good students.
Make sure they're good people. And then whatever happens, it's going to happen. You cannot force it.
There's around the corner from our house, it used to be an Arby's. It's now a Russian school of math. There are cars there at 9.30 at night. So when people tell me hockey people are crazy, I say, yeah, I think the math people are right there with us. It doesn't matter. Everybody wants so much more.
And when you and I were growing up, and again, as you mentioned, I'm a little older than you, so thanks for mentioning that. There was no private lesson to go to. There was no thought that you could go to the Babson Center at 6 a.m., four days a week, and work with Coach X on your stride, on your stick handling, on your shooting, on your backwards crossovers, whatever. It's like at 6 a.m., you were eating a bowl of Froot Loops and watching Go Go Gophers. Now these options are there. So for us to be like, oh, you don't have to do it, I don't know if you do or don't.
I just know that none of that guarantees you're going to get at the end of the road what you think you are when you set out. And so if you're not enjoying the journey, if you're not enjoying your child's exploration of growth and development and just being on a team and what that means, and even that's harder now, but if you're not enjoying that, more importantly, if your child's not enjoying it, it really doesn't matter where they wind up because you're going to have wished away six, eight, 10 years of their lives chasing something that may or may not come to fruition.
And so if you are foregoing family vacations to play in the Summer Splash Showdown in Guam, or you're playing in the soccer super series in Alaska and you're not going on family vacation, my honest opinion is you are missing out on opportunities for you and your children to have a lifelong connection that go far beyond the t-shirt you're going to get. And no one who has or has not played in one of those tournaments, that did not determine their future success.
[Jason Jacobs] (36:10 - 36:48)
I've heard you say before that you think, and correct me if I'm quoting wrong, but that failure is an important part of the development process. As a parent, and again, I'll come back to the parent questions because as much as this is an athletic show, it's an athletic development show. And so if athletics is a big part of your kid's stuff, right, there's a lot to sort through, what are the things that you should let them fail and learn the hard way on?
And what are the things that you should kind of step in and keep things on the rails? Because that's another thing I really wrestle with as a dad. Yeah.
[Jamie Rice] (36:48 - 41:22)
Is your child hurt or in danger versus unhappy? And it's really simple to say that way, but I think we, as adults, culturally, you know, emotionally, and I think obviously this, we're in a generation that had to deal with COVID where parents really did have to help necessitate some ability for their children and families to navigate that challenging time. But if your child's not in danger, you know, if it's hurt feelings versus being physically hurt, if it's, you know, disappointed versus, you know, being abused or beaten down, I think, you know, there's a great book, The Blessing of a Skinny Knee.
You're going to build some resilience and grit and character and toughness. And I think you're also going to allow them to decide what's really important to them. If you are stepping in constantly and when failure happens, providing the pathway to what may become less failure or what you hope is more success, then that's not their journey.
And at the end of the day, they are going to determine what they become much more, you know, growing up, having raised twins and being in coaching. So my twins were born in, our twins were born in 2006. So at that point, I had coached for 16 years.
And trust me, after all the books that I read and people I've been around, you know, nurture, nurture, nurture, nurture, nurture, nurture, nurture, you can create, you can develop, you can environment. And then these two come along, same parents. They literally are, you know, biologically almost the same person and they couldn't be more different.
And that was a real aha moment for me. And seeing as they've developed into young ladies who are, you know, we're very proud of as parents and just that we think are incredible young ladies. Nature wins out.
So if you are intervening in nature as a parent, if you are intervening with their ability to develop grit, resiliency, toughness, if you are intervening and not letting them fail. And again, no one likes to see their kids not do well. No one likes to see their kids fail.
Most of all, none of us like to see our kids upset. But is it a problem that they can work through? Is it something where they can come out on the other side of it with some things that are going to stick to them the rest of their lives versus something that, again, is causing them harm?
Harm and disappointment are two incredibly different things. I did not make the, you know, Newton Utah used to have double A and A. Double A was top team.
A was second team. My first year at Bantam, I didn't make 13 years old, didn't make the double A team. I was on the A team.
Okay, how it went, you know, I didn't move out of town. Now there was no options. There was no junior whatever.
I couldn't have, you know, but I played on that team. My freshman year at Babson, we used to have a JV team. The first night of the season, we had two scrimmages.
There was a JV game and a varsity game. And I played in both. And I was the only one in my class who played in both.
And I'm looking around thinking, geez, you recruited me. You thought I was a pretty good player. Why am I the only one in this JV game?
I don't know. I didn't ask. I just, okay, come at five, play at five and eight.
Okay, that's what I'll do. I didn't ask why. I didn't say, do I, you know, am I not good enough?
My parents didn't call and say, you know, he's not being treated fairly. Those are two real things that I've carried with me for a long, long time that I probably have never shared to right today. So this is the first time, Jay, like this is it.
But I had to learn about myself, you know, and I had to develop and fight through and both experiences wound up working out fine for me. So don't step in if your kid is disappointed. Certainly soothe them.
Try to explain that it's not the end of the world and that things can continue to move forward. But if they're not being harmed, I think being disappointed and having to find their way through that challenge is really, really helpful because there are very few things that we can truly interject into and change the pathway for them.
[Jason Jacobs] (41:22 - 42:59)
I know that in your practices, you do barely any drills and it's all compete, compete, compete. I've also heard you talk about how if you were the, I think you said the Massachusetts hockey czar, you would make it, everyone play for their town until you're 13, right? You know, when we grew up, we've talked about how different it was where you'd go out and play at the ODR for hours and a lot more unstructured time, a lot more playing in the neighborhood.
And it seems like the train's kind of left the station on this new world, right? And so we can, I think you've called it in prior episodes. I don't know why I remember all this stuff, but like old man yelling at the clouds, like you don't want to be the old man yelling at the clouds, right?
But at the same time, right, there's some things about the system, right, that maybe aren't ideal. So I think a tricky thing as a parent is not liking certain aspects of the system, but still needing to play the cards you're dealt, right? And so given that unstructured time where all the kids are around, you know, it's super hard to come by because everyone's on different club schedules.
For example, you know, what options do you have if your kid wants to play more, right? You can drag them around all these individual skills that I suspect you think don't translate well to game environment anyway. So not only are they inaccessible and expensive, but like they don't even work, right?
So I guess what advice do you have to navigate? Like do you just opt out if you don't like the system or do you hold your nose and play within the system even if you don't like it? Like how do you navigate if your kid truly loves the game and wants to play at as high level as he or she can?
[Jamie Rice] (42:59 - 47:13)
Probably yes, that would be the answer to all those questions. You know, I really don't like to tell people what they should do because every family circumstance is different, every child's circumstance is different, everybody's financial, like there's so many variables. I know what we did with our children which I think worked for them, but there's other kids who went a different path and it worked, you know, my daughter who plays field hockey here, she never played club field hockey, never played field hockey outside of, you know, four years at Lawrence Academy and she did some youth clinics with, ironically, our women's field hockey coach here, Bebs, and when she was eight, nine, and ten, but that was kind of like, you know, we got to divide and conquer and get these three kids out of the house and do something, and okay, she'd like to try this.
You can do everything, you don't have to do everything. I think that most people that you will encounter in any youth sport are well-intentioned. I don't think anybody's out there not trying to do a good job.
So however I view the game or how it should be taught or how it should be coached or what you should do, it doesn't mean I'm right. It's my perspective on things, you know. If we went to a restaurant, someone would get chicken, someone would get pasta, someone would get seafood, someone would get steak, someone would get a salad.
They're all great dishes. It's personal preference. I think as long as your child wants to do it, has no anxiety about it, has no fear of missing out about it, has no afterwards regret about it, you know, it's probably an evaluation.
I wouldn't say every day or every event, but I think an honest check-in, and it doesn't even have to be, I mean, you're not gonna really check in with an eight-year-old and say, hey, what do you feel about this emotionally, you know, how did you, but you know your own children. Like that's where I go back to parenting. Apply the same lessons in parenting that you do in everything else to youth sports, and it's hard because you've got competition, you've got more so than ever.
I don't think people are ever coming to your house saying, hey, kids should eat more potato chips. My kids eat potato chips, and look at them, they're six foot four, your kids need to eat more Lay's. They don't do that.
But when it comes to sports, like, hey, our kid played in the John Smith Soccer School, and look at him now, your kid's gotta do that. It's much easier. Or people look at it and say, hey, how'd your kid get to be so good?
Oh, he went to John Smith Soccer School. No one ever asked me how our son became six-four. You know, it just happened.
I tell people we hung him upside down at night and stretched him out. It just happened. He became six-four.
But no one's ever asked me that, but someone may say, hey, how did your son become a college football player? Oh, well, he went to St. Sebastian's, and he had Bob Seuss as a coach, and Ed McCartney, like, so I don't know that there's any way, but I don't think any of us as parents in general make bad decisions about helping our children grow and mature, you know, nurture them. I love ice cream.
I can't eat it every meal. I would be 700 pounds, and I'd, you know, probably have a heart attack, but I love ice cream, so I'm able to regulate that. If your child wanted to eat Eggo waffles breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you'd probably step in and say, yeah, you're gonna mix in, you know, some vegetables, or you're gonna have some protein, whatever it is.
Do the same thing with sports, you know, because there are, I mean, there's something on the menu every meal, every, from 6 a.m. to probably 10 p.m., and they still have to go to school. They still have to be a sibling, or be a, if they're an only child, a child to parents. They have to have friends.
They have to do other things. They have to play music. They have to read.
They have to have some alone time. They have to watch Stranger Things. Whatever it is they're gonna do, you know, just take the same thing you do as a parent, because I don't think there's any parent out there that will let their kid eat ice cream and not go to school all day.
Like, I don't want to go to school, and I just want to eat ice cream. Sure. It would take one question, be like, get out the door.
You're going to school. So try to apply your own parenting skills that you do in everything else to athletics, knowing that it's much harder. There are greater forces working against you to follow your instincts as a sports parent than there are as a regular parent.
[Jason Jacobs] (47:15 - 47:33)
Jumping over to the way you run practices, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, I've heard you say that, you know, maybe one or two drills a week, and it's mostly these, I know you hate the term small area games, so call it like, constraints-led, or I don't know what words you use. Those are good.
[Jamie Rice] (47:34 - 47:34)
Those are good.
[Jason Jacobs] (47:35 - 48:00)
Yeah. So are you, I mean, I'd love to understand that better. Are you more of a planner of that, or are you like a DJ that just kind of reads the room and like changes constraints on the fly?
Like, how scripted is that? And also, the stuff you're trying to teach there, like, is that teaching in your mind, or is it really just like creating an environment and stepping back, and that's as close to teaching as you're going to get?
[Jamie Rice] (48:01 - 52:50)
Again, yes to all. First and foremost, there's a tremendous amount of planning that does go. I mean, we're not just literally throwing the pucks out there and saying, hey, do whatever you want.
So all of the things that we do in practice, all of our games, they have constraints, variables, rules. We are trying to isolate a particular part of the game, knowing that, so if we're working on transition, that could be the emphasis, but obviously, people are going to be scoring, goals are going to be saved, we're going to have to defend. So we're playing the game of hockey within these games that have different variables, ice sizes, numbers, etc.
So that, you know, when the players get to a game, the game, the big game, they've been in those environments. I think there's a tremendous amount of self-learning by the players. I think that's most important.
Again, as a coach, as a teacher, I think it provides invaluable opportunities to teach and provide feedback. Because you are not saying, you should have turned left around that cone, you went right. You're saying, hey, this pass was available, and you didn't make it, or you didn't see it, or maybe this was a better option.
So, you know, you're providing feedback with what actually occurs in a game. And that's what I, you know, I think sometimes people are like, oh, he doesn't coach at all. I would say we coach a lot.
It's just not the demonstrative at a whiteboard, you do this. It's not at the front of the bus, like, hey, this is how we're going to do things. You know, I think most sports are overcoached right now.
You know, I think if you flip on a basketball game, and I'm not diminishing basketball at all, the player gets a rebound, and they immediately look to the bench, and the coach is gesticulating and do this and this and this. You know, how about the kid gets the ball and looks and assesses of what's going on, and I'm not, it sounds like I'm, you know, dumping on basketball coach. I'm not.
I just think most sports are really overcoached, so maybe that's why I've gravitated a little more to undercoaching, to letting the players develop, learn, make mistakes, fail, succeed. But within that, before we get on the ice and do those things, there is a lot of planning about how everything fits together, and how one game leads to another game leads to another game, what sequence the games are played in, what variables we might add to them, because we're usually every day drawing down on one or two really key points, and within those one or two key points, that's where the three or four games we play, they're the vitamins in the applesauce. They're kind of underneath there, although the players know, understand, yesterday was transition, but we're not talking about, well, is that strictly regrouping with the defensemen, is that strictly stealing a puck in the offensive zone, is that strictly a breakout? It could be any and all of those things.
You know, transition's a larger concept, so let's be able to handle it in a lot of different ways. I find it more enjoyable, I hope our players do. I think it means that no two practices are ever the same, even our Thursday practice, which has been the same practice for 22 years, 18, 20 times a year, each one of those Thursdays has been different, even though they've done the same six things.
So that's what I like about, you know, the players learning the game through playing games, and you as a coach decide, you know, what's important to you, how you want to do it, how you want to develop it, and then from there, let them have a little bit, and you can interject and create a constraint or variable or change the numbers to create another outcome potentially. But even, you know, I think of some of the games that we play here at Babson, that either I borrowed, stole, or begged from somebody else, or developed myself, a lot of times I start, I think this is what's going to be the outcome of this, and then they play it, and it's not. It's something completely different.
It's something that, you know, is completely, 100% different than what I thought the design of the game was. And I'm okay with that. I'm great with that, actually, because it's like they've taken it another level.
This is, coaching's a little like art. You know, you just kind of, I like this, someone else doesn't. That's fine.
I mean, you could be an incredibly systems-based, technical, hands-on coach and be really successful, and for me, great for you. You do you. This is how I view the game.
This is how we do things here at Babson. I'm not saying it's best. I'm not saying it's the only way.
I'm happy to talk about what and why and how we do it, but it's what we do.
[Jason Jacobs] (52:50 - 53:25)
Are there any particular coaches, or books, or leadership methodologies, or anything that you consider yourself a student of, or a disciple of, or is this really just kind of looking inwards? And I'll caveat what I've heard you say before, that one of the key reasons for your success at Babson is the autonomy that you're given to just go to the beat of your own drummer and do your own thing. So I'm just curious how much of what you just described is your own thing versus something that influenced that style.
[Jamie Rice] (53:25 - 58:13)
Yeah. I would say I've taken from everybody I've ever been around, some piece of them is a part of me today, some little particle, good, bad, or indifferent. Every book I've read, I think, has given me something that I could say, hey, I understand this one sentence.
It's something that fits into, I'll give you an example. Dan Coyle, who wrote The Little Book of Talent, as well as The Talent Code, was his first book. I was fortunate to correspond with him a few times, and just like a fan, I emailed him like, I love your stuff.
And he emailed me back. I was like, wow, this is great. We're friends.
Not really, but I thought we were. But his Little Book of Talent, he has a section where he talks about improv acting. And with improv acting, the actors have to know when to put themselves into a scene and when not to.
And the best at improv can do that. That's hockey. I took that, I highlighted it.
I think I've given it to the players every year. That's hockey. You've got to know when to put yourself into a scene and when not to.
So I have taken something from everybody. Certainly, my two high school hockey coaches, Joe Finnegan at Rivers and Jeff Kozak at Hotchkiss, and then my college coach, Steve Sterling, all had on my hockey thoughts, how I develop a hockey program, what I look for in players, who I am as a coach. Just strictly from hockey, they have a big imprint.
But I've been really fortunate to be around and coach with Bob Gaudet, who's my mentor, who retired from Dartmouth. I spent seven years with him when I was 23 to 30. I mean, talk about pretty formative years as a coach.
He taught me a lot about people and how to do things and an incredible high coach. But people I didn't work with, like Bill Beeney, was gracious with his time. Bill Beeney was doing games 40 years ago, and people thought, oh yeah, it's just Bill.
He was revolutionary, and I'm sure someone before him, he took from somebody. But I never worked for Bill Beeney. I competed against him one year at Colby in 1990, and probably 10 years here at Babson.
But he was gracious with his time when I was an assistant at Dartmouth. Spent two days with me, and hey, this is what I think and this is what I do. People in the Mass Satellite, from 1995 to 2004-ish, I was part of the Mass Satellite program.
I mean, I couldn't start to list all the coaches I worked with who I took something from. There were hundreds of them. So everybody's had a little piece of what I am today, and I hope everybody I continue to be around continues to do that.
Our baseball coach, Matt Noonan, is a lifelong friend. We played American Legion for Newton Post 440, and we taught coaching. So there's something he's given me.
It's just all combined. If I had one book that I really believe probably shaped a majority of what I believe would be the new toughness training for sports by James Lair, it was a book in 1992. Again, back to my college coach, Steve Sterling said to me, hey, you should probably get a master's.
I'm like, okay, where do I go? He's like, well, you should do it at BU. Okay, and what?
Education. Great, I'm on board. So I had a professor in sports psychology, the first class I took, Len Zykowski, and he gave us this book.
And I've read it every year since. And it is more about the individual than the team. It is more about individuals growing and developing toughness and grit and character and competitiveness.
It's both psychological and philosophical. But I would say that probably that book helped me as a coach. It's something I still go back on, and I try to go back on every book I have.
Chopwood, Carry Water, we read as a team five years ago, I love. But more than anything, that book spurred me on to want to read more and want to learn more and want to become a better coach and a better teacher and a better amateur psychologist and have a better understanding of the why, what, how, where things go. So if I had to pick just one book, it's probably easier than one person because that book really spurred so many different things, including my passion to read more about coaching, about leadership.
And then, as I said, I got screwed up, so I started reading more fiction. But I think like most people, I got out of college, and I'm done reading for a little bit. And all of a sudden, it was like this lightning bolt that came into my life.
It's like, hey, there's a lot of information out there. And if you want to be decent at what you do, you better get your hands around as much of it as you can.
[Jason Jacobs] (58:14 - 59:05)
I've had some D1 coaches on recently, and I've sensed some frustration, frustration that the rules keep changing under their feet, frustration that it's gotten more transactional all around, you know, both sides, right? You know, they have to be more transactional to get the best talent available, and the players are more transactional. They can just like take off through the portal at the first sign of adversity, right?
And that it's just more about recruiting than development. You strike me as a huge development guy. And so I'm really interested to hear what you're seeing at the Division III level, like, amongst your colleagues, but also you specifically, you know, because you also strike me as a strong willed guy who's just going to opt out if you don't, you know, no matter what the Joneses are doing.
So like, what are you seeing? And what are you doing?
[Jamie Rice] (59:06 - 1:03:02)
I think those guys at Division I have an incredibly hard job right now. I was 13 years an assistant in Division I. So I have some knowledge, but it was 22 years ago.
And as we've mentioned already, it's, you know, it's like every two years is a decade now and things that change. I think they have an incredibly hard job. And I think unfortunately, you know, everything tends to be emulated.
So what really started with football and basketball in the Division I landscape has now in fact, not in fact, it has now, you know, touched every other sport. So what we weren't dealing with by and large as a sport, much smaller community, 60, whatever Division I, so a smaller community, we weren't dealing with a lot of things. You know, there, there weren't very many families in Division I hockey who quote, couldn't afford a cheeseburger on a Friday night.
Nature of our sport, I'm not saying everyone's wealthy, but certainly the demographics of our sport are much different than Division I college football and Division I college hockey, completely different. But the rules that went into play for, for football and basketball then kind of become NCAA wide. So they're kind of a little bit of catching shrapnel from what those decisions were.
And I think they have to embrace it. I would imagine. I don't talk to them about it.
I kind of, I see them like, Hey, you guys do you good luck. I'm happy where I am here at Wellesley. It will come to our level on some, at some point in some variation.
I don't think you're going to see massive amounts of NIL money. I don't think you're going to see schools paying kids, but the transfer portal is probably more transfers now in a given year, the ability to just kind of jump in there and see who, you know, suit you. You know, we do now deal with player advisors a little more at our level than we did two years ago, four years ago, certainly 20 years ago.
It was non-existent. Yeah. I certainly do try to tilt at the windows.
I have a little too much Don Quixote in me sometimes because I, I can't fight every window. I don't, I don't have the answer because everyone's, you know, I think what Ted Donato was faced with at Harvard is much different than Mike Seuss at UNH is different than Greg Brown at BC. All great programs.
You've got an Ivy League school. You've got an ACC school and you've got a small state school, smaller state school. They're all coaching division one hockey.
Landscapes are incredibly different and their, their rules and variations and limitations and constraints. And how does, you know, how do we have a rule that let's just, again, take the I don't know how many transfers Harvard's had in the last 22 years that Ted Donato has been there. My guess is it's on one hand and maybe one finger would be my guess.
I don't know that for a fact, but another school may be able to have eight transfers a year. But so they're playing by the same rules, the same NCA hockey rule book, the same NCA rules for the division. But Ted's playing with a much different constraints of variables than some of his peers are.
And even within the haves and the have nots. So I don't know how you stop any of it. I don't know how you change any of it.
Certainly. I think John Calipari I heard on a podcast was saying, you know, he thinks it should go back to the, you know, you can transfer once and then after that you have to sit a year. That makes some sense to me.
I know if someone would cry, well, but a coach could be at three schools and, you know, you're dealing with what's crazy is what really, you ever see the movie North Dallas 40?
[Jason Jacobs] (1:03:03 - 1:03:03)
No.
[Jamie Rice] (1:03:05 - 1:03:06)
Great movie, Nick Nolte.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:03:06 - 1:03:07)
I'll write it down now. Yeah.
[Jamie Rice] (1:03:07 - 1:05:01)
Great, great movie in the 80s. And it's loosely based on Dallas Cowboys. And Nick Nolte is this receiver who's in the twilight of his career, but been a very good player.
And ultimately the team says they want him to take a shot to, to get through a game. And, you know, and that's a show the other players like, Hey, if you shoot up, whatever, take the morals out of it. And he has a line and he says to the team president, he says, you know, whenever I call this a game, you call it a business.
And whenever I call it a business, you call it a game. And I think that's what NCAA division one is in right now. Right now, the coaches are in it because it's a game and the outside world is saying you're a business.
And then as soon as the coaches say a business, they'll say, we'll say, Hey, you're just coaching a game here. What are you doing? So it's, I cannot imagine the challenges and difficulties they have.
And everybody has something. Our level Newton North high school has challenges. I mean, you might not have a goalie on your team.
If no one in Newton is a goalie, it goes to Newton North. Like, okay, what do you do then? So everyone has challenges.
I'm amazed, inspired by, I find it remarkable that they're able to continue to do what they do at such a high level with, as you said, not only the ground shifting beneath their feet, but it's also shifting above their head from the sides, from the front, from the back. And there's 9,000 different places and people and things that are changing it. Whereas I'm sure they'd love to just come to the rink in the morning, draw practice, put a whistle around their neck, run their practice, go home and not have to worry about that.
But I would assume for many of them, if they get a couple hours respite to be with their children or their wives and just put it aside, that's probably a lot.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:05:02 - 1:05:12)
How much of that is seeping into your world and directionally, how much do you expect that it will, given your comment before about how the seeping is a natural phenomenon?
[Jamie Rice] (1:05:13 - 1:06:48)
Dr. Kahneman Yeah. I mean, certainly one thing that's changed is that we have more advisors than ever contacting us. Obviously, they have players.
So there's more players who have advisors. I'm extrapolating out math-wise now. If more advisors are contacting us, that means they have more players.
If there are more players, they have to have more advisors. So that's one aspect of it. It's really competitive to get a spot anywhere in college hockey or college athletics.
So parents are saying, if there's someone who can help me, oh my God, we got to get help and this person will help me. Again, the financial pieces, I think the bigger financial piece is private school versus public school and financial aid, cost of attendance, opportunity to provide your child an education and not be in debt the rest of your life and or have them be in debt the rest of their life. So I don't think we'll see players getting paid at our level.
I don't think the barn wants to call me up and say, hey, we'd love to give you $100,000 to give to your players to do shoe ads for us. That's not going to happen. We're in Boston in a big market.
They've got to work through 158 teams before they get to Babson Hockey for any of that. But I think it's inevitable that certainly the first piece that probably has the amount of transfers that are now at Division III schools or looking to move from Division I to Division III and or are open to that possibility and can put themselves in the portal to have that opportunity.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:06:48 - 1:06:57)
Do you have a duty to put the best players that you can on the ice or is your duty to the current players to develop them first and foremost?
[Jamie Rice] (1:06:57 - 1:10:01)
Yes to both. My commitment, our commitment as a program is to the players and their families that we will help them have a four-year experience where they will have the opportunity to play. Now how much or how much success is going to be up to them and that's sometimes hard for players or families to understand.
We are going to play to win on Friday and Saturday, not at all costs, but when we play a game and the officials come and they turn on the scoreboard, it's time to win. Winning is more fun than losing. But we have an obligation to the families that we will help them navigate this incredibly challenging four-year period of their life and hopefully turn out on the other side with a job, a great experience, some good friends, and a chance to succeed.
We have had transfers. We have one now. We have a smaller roster than most of our peers.
We have never brought in somebody to replace somebody. We have brought in somebody, whether it be a freshman or transfer, because we had an opportunity. So last year we had six seniors who graduated.
We have four freshmen and one transfer. So we have one less person than graduated a year ago. So our transfer who came in, we didn't have six freshmen and then the transfer presented themselves and said, oh, now we can have seven.
We got to figure out, you know, Machiavellian, who we're going to get rid of. We only had four. We had an opportunity, a roster spot, a locker.
So we're happy to have them. So whenever we've had a transfer, it's been, you know, we have a spot and our admissions was closed. We weren't getting any more freshmen at that point.
So that wasn't an option. They could do that. That's how we choose to do things.
I don't know if it's best. It's just what I believe in. When someone drops their child off here, and I understand fully in the course of their child's four years, that probably 50% of things that we decide as a hockey program, they're going to say that guy's crazy.
You know, I should have played this guy with that, or my kid should be playing more on the power play, or he likes it, whatever it is. But I hope that they can truly at the end of the four years say, you know what? He helped our son be a part of a good college program, get into a great school, get a great education, and have a good experience.
That's our duty. We've had one player that I've recruited in 22 years who we have cut and had nothing to do with hockey. And I wish it was zero.
It's not. We've had one player, and it wound up, we recruited him. We got to know him as much as we could.
We thought he was going to be a great fit, and just, it wasn't. But Ed, it had nothing to do with ability. You know, there have been kids who graduate from here.
We have a captain who graduated in 2010 who didn't have a goal. And he played every game for four years, and he never scored a goal. So, I think we're doing it more than just quote-unquote ability when we're trying to make these decisions about how to keep our roster at the right size and who we need to have on it.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:10:03 - 1:10:39)
I'll be really curious when I make the rounds to other Division III coaches, how many of them have a similar philosophy. I suspect that a lot of them feel pressure to get more transactional and chase talent at all costs. And I admire that you are sticking to your guns, because I think it's very clear that that has been one of the recipes for Babson's long-term success as a program versus just, you know, because once you start sacrificing that for the short term, maybe you can win a few extra games, but then it's a leaky boat.
[Jamie Rice] (1:10:39 - 1:12:39)
You do you, I do me. And it's not the only, it's not the best, just how we've chosen to do things. And certainly, I'm a competitive person.
I might come off sounding kind of Pollyannish, you know, he doesn't coach much in practice, and the kids just throw the sticks out there and play. And he just, you know, whoever comes, comes. Like, no, I'm a competitive person, but I think I've tried to strike a balance between being really competitive, not making it about me, about having a great experience for everybody, myself included, which winning helps.
But I don't reside at other schools. I don't know their parameters. And my boss in Babson College would like us to be very good.
Maybe I'm naive to how much pressure there is on us or on me. I mean, I feel more pressure for our program to continue to be successful based on our history than I do, than any pressure, you know, our school president could put on me. Like I, you know, I have a lot of alumni who play a lot of hockey games here on a lot of really good teams who want to see us continue that and don't want us to fall off a cliff.
I feel more pressure from that than I could if my boss, the athletic director of the president said to me, you know, you need to have 20 wins. Like, hey, I'm trying, you know, if you think you can do better, here's the whistle. But trust me, we're going to do everything we can to win, but I think we can do it in a moral and humane and healthy way.
But there might be other schools that's like, hey, we got to win because it drives applications or we're investing XYZ into this program or we're paying you XYZ or giving you one, two, three spots in missions. They have those constraints. I get it.
You know, you do you. And maybe it's a place that can't get all the kids they want as freshmen. Maybe it's a place that financial aid wise, you know, can't get enough kids.
So, they have to do what they have to do. We've just been fortunate to be able to continue to do it the way we have.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:12:40 - 1:13:46)
So, I'm an entrepreneur. I actually went to Babson. So, I got my MBA at Babson.
So, I was there 2003 to 2005. So, your first year as a coach, I was there as a grad student, funny enough. And I went there because I was in functional roles in startups and was looking to pivot to entrepreneurship and didn't feel ready and needed to, you know, needed a little blankie and for someone to kind of pat me on the back and tell me it was okay, I guess.
But at any rate, I have been exploring potentially doing something in this space. The problem that I am drawn to is, well, I guess a couple of clarifying questions. So, one, it's been said that with the rise of all these individual skills coaches that the skill of the game is going up, but it's not translating well.
And so, that might be said as like, it's not translating well, that might be said as IQ is suffering. Like, it's said different ways, but the general theme is that individual skills going up, but the team dynamics are going down or at least not progressing in the way that the individual skills are. How do you react to that?
[Jamie Rice] (1:13:47 - 1:19:15)
I would say I agree. But again, there's so many layers to it. Unstructured free time, you know, if you went to public hockey someplace and it was kids, not adult, you know, at Babson at noon, chances are a father or two would intervene and try to give it some shape.
So, you know, when we used to play at the Cove, Billy Cleary, the legendary Harvard coach and Olympian, and he would be playing in these games and he wasn't like, hey, do it this way. He was just playing. Then you could be playing against 14-year-olds or eight-year-olds or, you know, great players.
I don't know whoever it was, depending on who showed up at the Cove. And I'm certainly romanticizing it a little bit. I think that part of the reason, going back to your question earlier, that we practice the way we do is I probably philosophically believe that hockey sense is lacking a little bit.
And that skill is greater than. Now, Tom Sasser, who I played with in 1987 and 88, is the greatest player in the history of our college, or one of three or four. You know, he was incredibly skilled.
We had this debate in our locker room last year. One of the players was saying, if we played the Olympic team and they had their equipment and we had our equipment, the game's faster. I said, yeah, I agree with all of it.
They'd still beat us. Like, they are better players. Even with their wooden sticks and their, you know, slower game and whatever and, you know, how Jim Craig played.
You know, Ted Williams hit 521 home runs with a ball that was probably in the game for five or six innings. You know, now the average major league ball is in play for like 2.2 pitches or something. So they're hitting a better ball with better technology.
So players are able, individually skill-wise, to do things that we didn't even think of. And maybe because we weren't as inventive, maybe no one, you know, maybe guys did things without it being explained to them when I was growing up. But there's, you know, routinely something every year that somebody does.
I'm like, I've never seen that before. You know, two years ago, one of our defensemen, the first time I saw it was the thing on a flip puck, tried to catch it with his stick out, as opposed to glove it and put it down. I'm like, wait a second, what was that?
What just happened? And I'd been in hockey for a long time. And then a lot of kids could do that.
You know, the backhand toe drag, a toe drag, the Michigan, whatever it is. Like, no one thought to try it. So I think there's some real great things that have come from the individual skill development.
But I do think non-competitive, in other words, no one defending you or trying to prevent you from succeeding, isolated, individual skill development does not necessarily help you become a better hockey player on a team, if that's a nice political way to say it. I think it can help you as a player individually, skill-wise. I certainly think that there is motor mastery, you know, the 10,000 hour rule.
I get that. And I think there is a time and place that those could come into play in a game. I get that.
I think it's amazing how far the players have expanded the possibilities. It does not mean you are a better hockey player or you have a better understanding of how that fits into the game. And so I do translate that back to isolated, non-defended, non-competitive, individual skills that are born out of repetition.
I don't think that makes you a better hockey player. I think it helps you become a better skill player or be able to do more things. But then can you take that and, you know, you could give me the manual right now in my Toyota Camry.
It's great. I have it. I could read it.
90% of what goes wrong with my car, I can't fix. I have the manual. I could read it.
I could study it. I go to O'Reilly Auto Parts. I could get the tools.
I could get whatever. I'm still not sure I could do it. I pay a mechanic because he has expertise.
And we just had this happen to one of our cars four months ago. Took it to one place. Oh my God, it's $2,500.
This car will never run again. I hooked it up to the computer. It spit out 11 things.
You've got this failure, this failure. This guy listened to it. I think I can fix it.
$500. So his ability as a mechanic was born out of individual skill, learning how to do things, how to operate the tools, but also just doing, listening, feeling, touching. And I think that's the part that's probably missing quite a bit in sports right now.
And again, it doesn't mean that individual skill development or coaches are not good or valuable. They are. How do you take that and add it to other pieces to help you as a player become a better player?
Because ultimately, at least in hockey, you have to play with the other people on the ice. And Tarasov was talking about it 60 years ago. And Herb Brooks was talking about it 40 years ago.
And go down the line. Everyone's been talking about it. So whatever the skill level is or isn't, it's still a matter of trying to get the orchestra all playing the same notes the right way at the right time.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:19:17 - 1:20:09)
Okay. So that's validating for the things that I've also observed. Your method of addressing it, whether it's, again, consciously or subconsciously, has been creating environments where they are working on things in a way that is more similar to what they face in game environments.
So they can get those 10,000 hours actually doing something in a similar environment versus in a way that's not going to translate when you actually step on the ice in a game with a referee, with, you know, et cetera. So what I've been thinking about is how do you address that? Because, well, the problem is that most people don't have you as a coach, right?
[Jamie Rice] (1:20:09 - 1:24:59)
That can be a good thing for some too. I don't want to cut you off, but I've said this often, I think about this. And maybe I'm opening the door for an entrepreneur.
How does a baby learn to walk? How does it learn to walk better? How does it learn to run?
There is no walking baby coach. And again, maybe I've just opened the door and it's going to be a billion dollar business, I should have trademarked it. But it's hard in sports for people to understand that some of this you can develop on your own and you need the right environment.
You need the right opportunity. You need the right passion out of the young man or woman, boy or girl. You need the right confluence of events.
You need a lot of different things. But the alternative is that those things do not guarantee you. I guess that's my overarching thing, is that we have been led in almost everything.
You're overweight, take the big pharma operates, not to keep us from getting sick, not to get political, but to use theirs to, you know, we're not treating the disease, we're treating the symptom. And athletics, academics, there's no difference. Everyone wants the secret path, sauce, pill, answer.
And this is one of those ones I say my players sometimes I probably think like the guy is nuts. He is the Wizard of Oz. The lesson of the Wizard of Oz is Dorothy had the power all along.
She didn't know it. She had to go through her trials and tribulations to understand that she could get back to Oz on her own by clicking her nails three times. It wasn't the wizard alone that did that.
And it's more about her discovery, her journey, her development than it is just getting back to Kansas. And whether we want to say it was a dream or not, that's the message of that story. So when people are seeking others to validate, guarantee, provide the pathway, it has value, but there's no guarantees.
And if you go into it, and again, like my child loves hockey. He wants to play more. He wants to succeed.
First of all, look at the genetic factor. Like there is something, if you walked in an NHL locker room or a Division I locker room right now, and you lined all the players up, you'd be like, huh, they all look pretty similar. And even, you know, Brad Marshan, who's shorter, is built genetically different than a player who's here.
Then you provide the opportunity for them to have the experiences and get some qualified coaching and learn some things. Then do they take it and apply it on their own? Do they take the skating lesson here?
And then do they, you know, try to do some squat jumps for better knee bend? Do they take the stick handling lesson with whoever, and then go in their driveway, basement, garage, and do some of those on their own? Do they take the shooting lesson with whatever ex-shooting coach, and then go in the driveway and shoot some pucks on their own?
That's, you need some teaching. None of us are experts. And I know it's really simplistic to say the baby walking, running coach, but if you took a sport like running, they're not there at inception when the baby learns to walk.
The coaches and the training, and you think of it more at an Olympic level, you know, track and field, college level, certainly high school. But at eight or nine, are they really training with somebody from Sweden to maximize their VO2 output and start? They're learning to run fast.
And maybe they strength train. Maybe they have genetic fast twitch fibers as opposed to somebody else. Maybe they just say, you know what, I'm slower than the person next to me, and I'm going to do whatever they can to beat them.
And they just push themselves to that level. So I don't want to say anybody entrepreneurially can't, you know, get involved. Anybody who's trying, I said at the outset, I don't think anybody is trying to do harm.
I think everyone believes what they're doing helps, and I'm sure it does. Just choose wisely. You know, that's, you know, choose wisely.
That's another movie reference, you know, the Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail, he gets there, and they're trying to figure out which one is the cup of salvation. And the knight that's guiding it says to him, choose wisely. And I think that that's what parents have to do.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:24:59 - 1:26:39)
And that's a reason I haven't anchored on any solution yet. And I'm not going to force it either. I'm not going to anchor unless I truly build conviction, like deep conviction for myself, that it's not just, you know, a pill to mask the symptoms, right, but it actually is fundamentally addressing the problem.
But I think the problem, or call it a problem or an opportunity, right, is that some of the stuff that you are going out of your way, like you can say it's the kids teaching themselves, but like, you are being really intentional about the environments that you're creating, right? And I think there's a number of things about the game, this is my thesis, but you can tell me it's a bunch of crap, if that's what your reaction, but is that there's a bunch of, there's kind of a long tail of things about the game that conventional wisdom says are innate, you either have them or you don't, but are actually getting taught. But the way they're getting taught isn't necessarily run to this instructor or run to that instructor.
But it's like, you know, having a dad or mom that played the game at a high level, you know, at the breakfast table, who's like, hey, remember that thing in the game like that, you know, like, like your timing should be this or, you know, come in a little sooner or try it this way, or do it that way, or use the boards in this way, or, or you should be scanning or, you know, like, like, like teaching to scan, teaching cognitive, like, I, I don't know, maybe it can't be taught, but, but it seems like it's not just genetics, why there's so many recognizable last names on the back of the jerseys, right? I think some of it is through the osmosis of getting inside the minds of people that really understand the game at that kind of black diamond level.
And so how can you package that for everyone that didn't, you know, have a recognizable last name as a, as a mom or a dad.
[Jamie Rice] (1:26:39 - 1:29:51)
But I think the flip side of that is, if that was true, only those kids would be succeeding. Austin Matthews' parents were not NHLers. I think it's more noticeable now.
Again, I'm not sure I knew anybody from outside of Newton, Mass. till I was 12 or 13 years old, I went to Rivers. So if you had told me that, you know, Piccolo Pete, who played for Ludlow Youth Hockey, that his father played in the NHL, I might not have even known that.
You know, I've been, who'd he play for? Well, he played for Detroit in the original six in the sixties. I would have been like, yeah, what?
You know, now you can pull up hockey DB and you can trace the lineage. But the fact is that every professional player who's had a child has not gone on to be a professional player. Some have with wild success.
Take the Kachuks. I don't think Sidney Crosby's father played in the NHL. No, maybe he did.
Maybe I'm wrong. I love Sidney Crosby, but you know, so again, it's, you know, there's people that Jason, there's people think I am nutty, like how he does things. He's full of crap.
It's not right. He, you know, he, whatever. And that's fine.
You mentioned earlier about, you know, I've been, I've said that I'm fortunate, you know, I am not ruled by or fear the judgment of others, but I'm also not going to tell you this is the only way you have to. It's how, when I talk about it, some people might always, I'm just, people ask me, this is how we do it. I'm not telling you should do it this way.
I believe in what we do. These are the reasons, as I just mentioned about isolated skill versus team play, but I'm not saying it's the only way, but I do not, I think for any entrepreneur, you know, if you wanted to start something tomorrow, number one thought I would give you or piece of advice, you're going to have 50% of people think you're nuts and 50% of people think you're great, you know, and that's probably a lesson that I, as a coach have learned, you know, over the years is like, you know, people don't agree with what I do or what I say or how we, perhaps while we're successful and there's players and families who think it stinks. I love a black and white frap.
There's people who think it's and that's their own perspective, their own lens, their own right, and I'm fine with that, you know, and I think it's really hard when you're an entrepreneur starting something because you do need the validation and the quotes and the, you know, the stream of customers to be successful. So it's like, if you don't start off really successful or you don't have that Jack Eichel at eight who enters your program, who Jack Eichel gets 90% of the credit, but you helped them, then it's really, really hard for anybody because I don't know what the statistics, I should as a Babson alum and employee, but I'm sure there's some statistic on how many entrepreneurs fail and I'm sure it's much larger, you know, we all sing, we all see a shark tank or the ring camera, oh, I could do that, why didn't I, there's probably a thousand and one for that one that fail.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:29:52 - 1:29:53)
We're in camera, Babson alum.
[Jamie Rice] (1:29:54 - 1:33:49)
Exactly. It's, you know, that fear of failure, but more importantly, the fear of judgment from others can be, and I think that translates to what we've kind of been talking about in a roundabout way today for families and their young athletes. You know, are we being judged for what we have or haven't done?
Are we being judged for, you know, how my son or daughter is or isn't as a player? Are we being judged for, you know, what team we've been on, for what neighborhood we live in, for how big our house is, for how big our car is? So we talk a lot as adults and parents now, but our kids with FOMO, they have a fear of missing out.
The kids, oh, the kids, kids, they can't do anything because they have this fear of missing out. Well, don't we as parents, haven't we been providing an environment for them where our fear of judgment maybe creates that fear of missing out? You know, I have had friends who have one or two children who live in five or six bedroom houses.
I grew up with seven of us in a three bedroom house. So somewhere along the line, what you drove, where you lived, what your neighborhood was, what the cul-de-sac was, what school you went to, you know, had a large bearing on how other people viewed you because there really is no reason for somebody with one child to have a five bedroom house. Now they can, fine, you do you, I've said that.
But practically speaking, they do not need five bedrooms. And so while we as parents and adults say, oh, these kids have FOMO, have we created FOMO because we have shown them that we're worried about what other people think about us. We are worried about being judged by other people and how they view our status, you know, how good of a family we have based on, you know, what our zip code is or our address.
And someone said this to me a year ago and I love it and I use it all the time now. You know, life is not the Christmas card. What you see when you get the Christmas card is the staged shot with everyone smiling and everything perfect.
And the reality is most of us have that 90% under the water like an iceberg. That's really hard. We have illness.
We have sickness. We have, you know, deaths, unfortunately. We have bursts.
We have success in our personal lives. We have failures. We have pipes that burst in our front yard.
We have washes that don't work. We have kids who don't get into the schools they want to. We have stocks that tank.
The Christmas card looks really good. And oh my God, look at them. They're on vacation in wherever and they're all smiling.
Two minutes before that picture they could have banged each other's throats. And so when we are thinking about decisions for our kids that we as adults are making, I think we have to think a little bit about decisions we make in our own lives and are some of those decisions we've made consciously or subconsciously affecting our children. And if we're going to bemoan their decisions, can we sit back and say, maybe something I did gave them a little bit of an inkling that appearance is important or what we belong to or what team we're on.
Maybe some of that we've created in their lives almost unwittingly and not negatively. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but I do think that everything tends to be somewhat interconnected.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:33:50 - 1:33:57)
Yeah, gosh. Well, the purpose of this show is not to find the answers. I mean, there are no answers.
[Jamie Rice] (1:33:57 - 1:33:59)
Knock it again for me. I know that much.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:33:59 - 1:34:21)
Yeah, but it's really just to kind of push on this stuff, see if kind of work through some of the knots. It's a great way to learn. I really enjoy it.
But this discussion, not excluded, it's been a wonderful discussion. I'm really grateful for you making the time. Is there anything I didn't ask that you wish I did or any parting words you'd like to leave with listeners?
[Jamie Rice] (1:34:22 - 1:35:37)
No, I appreciate you having me on. As I said, I don't have all the answers. This is my thoughts and my beliefs and how we do things here at Babson from a hockey coaching standpoint, but I'm blessed.
I had a great family who supported me and gave me opportunities to play sports, to attend Rivers Hotchkiss, come to Babson, to chase my passion as a coach. It certainly wasn't a traditional path in my family and or at Babson at that time. And I just, you know, I hope people can all find their own way and really trust their own true north and wherever it takes you, it's all part of your story.
And I really don't have the answers. I just have my thoughts on things and it doesn't mean any of them are right. I guess much like anything else, if someone has stayed on now for the hour and 36 minutes that we've been on and they haven't fallen asleep, you know, it just, I hope you have something you took from this podcast that you'd say, you know what, that's a little piece of maybe it's a part of one sentence and maybe it's going to help them in some manner, then I'm thankful.
But I appreciate you considering me as someone to have on and then ultimately having me on today.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:35:38 - 1:35:57)
Yeah. Well, the show is called Puck Academy and you're a hockey coach, but the discussion was, was, you know, was much more holistic, I think, about hockey and new sports, but also about parenting and about life. So yeah, again, I really enjoyed it.
Grateful. Thank you, coach. And best of luck in the rest of the season too.
[Jamie Rice] (1:35:57 - 1:35:59)
Thank you very much. And thank you to everyone who's listening today.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:36:00 - 1:36:11)
Thanks for listening to Puck Academy. If you enjoyed this episode, follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone serious about their game. See you next week.