Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

[dontyelldad]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

What is unclear from this "lobby" is whether all this dissension is coming from those no longer with the team, and unhappy with the impact on them (probable, and not unexpected under any circumstances)....or is coming from those still within the team unhappy with the impact of change.

Hopefully it's not the latter, or its going to be a longer year than usual at Brown.

Just wanted to pull this from the dustbin. Speaking of longer years than usual....

Ivy League Word of the Day: "Calculus."

As in, "when you decide to communicate, please try to calculate the potential outcomes of the communication."

OK, here:

Re: Statistical analysis. I'm good with that. As long as you understand that there are "(1) Lies; (2) Dam*ed Lies; and (3) Statistics". Actually, I'm not a big fan of pseudo science in organizational analysis, which this thread purports to be. Please try to remember that Brown is an educational organization, and that motivations that drive people (i.e., players) to apply/attend there do not necessarily correlate with motivations that drive people to other schools, be the others Ivy, ECAC or otherwise.

And business analogies, e.g., "You or I would have been fired." simply do not apply. College coaches are teachers, the more apt analogy would be academic freedom, rather than corporate performance evaluation (for whatever THAT is worth). {This speaks to D3 and Ivy women's hockey coaches, not DI football coaches, by the way. Gray areas exist between those points, so I won't even begin to go there.}

Let's try to take this to the "bottom line".

Please compare the "upside" of trying to address whatever issues you perceive on a public website vs. the "downside."

If you choose to continue this tra*n wreck, please try to address that calculus.

My "back of the envelope" analysis shows:

(1) No Upside: no realistic possibility of correcting perceived problems "HERE"

vs.

(2) Big Downside: the strong likelihood of creating problems for current team members, undermining team/coach chemistry/parent child relationships and creating the argument that any potential reforms (should they be warranted) are being promoted by some disinterested and anonymous web site jerks.

Frankly, I got no dog in the fight.

Your call.

 

[Trillium]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

Trillium..That is quite the research, thanks for posting it. Some key pieces of additional information that would really help are the following:
1 - How many of the departs still graduate from the same school
2 - How many dissappear due to academic reasons
3 - How many dissappear due to dissatisfaction with playing time
4 - How many dissappear cause they "lost interest" / "found it too tough"
5 - How many dissappear due to a change in coaching or team philosophy.
(You partially went into this last one with the caoching changes at a couple of schools).

In the mean time check your rep !.

1) Obviously, I have no way of figuring out how many graduated from the same school but stopped playing, unless that info was supplied from insiders at each school. However, it is highly likely that the vast majority of the 26% of Ivy students who left their teams still graduated, since their financial aid is not impacted. Except in cases where a player stopped playing due to injury at the non-Ivy schools, or was not a scholly player, it is probable that the majority of the 33.8% of non-Ivy students did not graduate from that institution.

2) Similarly, those who stopped playing for academic reasons are a private matter. However, I don't see any reason why that proportion would be higher at any of the schools with the highest early departure rates, or lower at those schools with low rates. Certainly this does not explain the high drop-off rate at Brown, as schools ranked both higher and lower academically have much lower rates.

3 & 4) You would have to conduct "exit interviews" with those players who left each program to determine their reasons for leaving. I would suspect in many cases there is likely more than one contributing factor. And I would suspect intuitively that those who drop hockey due at least in part to playing time issues or academic pressures would be higher at Ivy's...because they still have the option to stay in the school regardless, and because the academic demands on their time (and their academic interests to begin with) may be greater. However, less dissatisfaction with playing time may be a partial explanation for Yale, Dartmouth and Princeton's lower attrition rates versus the ECAC/Ivy norm, as they have also historically had the smallest rosters in the ECAC over the years.

5) Five ECAC teams had head coaching changes during that period, and four of them were in the top 5 in early departure rates. While each had high turnover prior to the change, having a new coach did also precipitate further spikes in turnover in the year or two after the change. Whether the turnover was at the instigation of the coach or the players in each situation is again known only to insiders. The one exception was St. Lawrence, which remains one of the lowest player turnover teams despite a new coach last season, although a spike of 4 players did leave there too after his first year.

 

[hcky85]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

7) Am I the only one who was surprised that the ECAC early departure rate was as high as 30.2%, and that the Ivies are actually lower than Non-Ivies (26.0 vs 33.8%)?

The high rate in some part has to be credited to Claudia Asano having more impact than what a new coach at a program typically has, the out of the ordinary situation at Cornell last year, and as you already mentioned Quinipiac.

 

[CanHockGuy]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

Losing, lack of ice time, poor personal performance on or off the ice, or not fitting in to team concepts/chemistry may be the short version......

 

[Trillium]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

The high rate in some part has to be credited to Claudia Asano having more impact than what a new coach at a program typically has, the out of the ordinary situation at Cornell last year, and as you already mentioned Quinipiac.

Not really....

don't forget using 6 years of data for each school goes a long way to smoothing out the short-term impact of a coaching change within any program, or other unusual occurrences within a team in a particular season.

in addition, it's not simply 3-4 schools with disproportionally high rates/problems which are dragging the overall ECAC rate up...only 4 schools out of 12 have a rate below 20% over a 6 year period. That surprises me.

 

[OnMAA]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

Not really....

don't forget using 6 years of data for each school goes a long way to smoothing out the short-term impact of a coaching change within any program, or other unusual occurrences within a team in a particular season.

in addition, it's not simply 3-4 schools with disproportionally high rates/problems which are dragging the overall ECAC rate up...only 4 schools out of 12 have a rate below 20% over a 6 year period. That surprises me.

Prior to your research I would have guessed the average number to be about 20-25%, so 30% is indeed higher than what I would have expected...

Couple of thoughts:
1 - For Scholly schools, you have on average 6 new players each year, 4 Full plus two walk-ons or some other combo of full and halves etc. Typically the weakest two in each class may not play the full 4 years. Note that the weakest two at the end of one or two years could be different from the weakest two during recruiting, sometimes leading to a departure. That happens more often than you think. So 2 of 6 from each class not surviving is 33%....Hmmm...30% looks surprisingly predictable all of a sudden.

2 - For Ivy schools, they often tend to recruit three type of players...
....A - The high end player with marginal Ivy educational talents
....B - The bread and butter Ivy player, Good in school, mid pack D1 material
....C - The Marginal D1 player with Great educational talents
Note that A,B and C choices do not take FA factors into account as they play a significant roles as well.
You will find that many of the players in Category C will not last the four years, and that the odd player in Category A may not survive the academics.Some Ivy's need to ensure to get some "C" players in to make their class admissable as a whole. At the end of the day, my guess is that many of the C-players do not play the full four years. Again this would lead to a predictable ~30% drop-off rate.

I do find the low Yale number both impressive and very surprising.

 

[notfromaroundhere]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

Prior to your research I would have guessed the average number to be about 20-25%, so 30% is indeed higher than what I would have expected...

Couple of thoughts:
1 - For Scholly schools, you have on average 6 new players each year, 4 Full plus two walk-ons or some other combo of full and halves etc. Typically the weakest two in each class may not play the full 4 years. Note that the weakest two at the end of one or two years could be different from the weakest two during recruiting, sometimes leading to a departure. That happens more often than you think. So 2 of 6 from each class not surviving is 33%....Hmmm...30% looks surprisingly predictable all of a sudden.

2 - For Ivy schools, they often tend to recruit three type of players...
....A - The high end player with marginal Ivy educational talents
....B - The bread and butter Ivy player, Good in school, mid pack D1 material
....C - The Marginal D1 player with Great educational talents
Note that A,B and C choices do not take FA factors into account as they play a significant roles as well.
You will find that many of the players in Category C will not last the four years, and that the odd player in Category A may not survive the academics.Some Ivy's need to ensure to get some "C" players in to make their class admissable as a whole. At the end of the day, my guess is that many of the C-players do not play the full four years. Again this would lead to a predictable ~30% drop-off rate.

I do find the low Yale number both impressive and very surprising.

So happy to see this thread turn to serious analysis of serious facts.

 

[Hockeydad4two]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

Trillium,
I looked through your post regarding the statistics concerning a school's departure rate and this is what I was able to pull out. Did I miss Clarkson and RPI in the message? If not, could you fill in the numbers just to complete the analysis? Thanks!!!

School........Depart. Rate

Yale..................9.1%
Dartmouth.........15.6%
Colgate.............16.7%
Princeton ..........19.4%
St. Lawrence.....20.5%
Harvard............23.7%
Cornell.............34.1%
Union...............43.6%
Brown..............44.7%
Quinnipiac.........52.1%
Clarkson...........
Rensselaer........

 

[OnMAA]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

Trillium,
I looked through your post regarding the statistics concerning a school's departure rate and this is what I was able to pull out. Did I miss Clarkson and RPI in the message? If not, could you fill in the numbers just to complete the analysis? Thanks!!!

School........Depart. Rate

Yale..................9.1%
Dartmouth.........15.6%
Colgate.............16.7%
Princeton ..........19.4%
St. Lawrence.....20.5%
Harvard............23.7%
Cornell.............34.1%
Union...............43.6%
Brown..............44.7%
Quinnipiac.........52.1%
Clarkson...........
Rensselaer........

Clarkson is 33.3

 

[ARM]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

...only 4 schools out of 12 have a rate below 20% over a 6 year period. That surprises me.

I don't think it is that surprising, when I consider the kids I started college with, how many of them did not go on to earn a degree from that school or at least attend it for four years. None of them were varsity athletes; sometimes, things just change in the lives of people that age. The school, the degree program, the campus, the city, college as a whole -- if any of these aren't a good fit, the student may leave. For an athlete, there are just more variables that have to fit.

 

[Trillium]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

Trillium,
I looked through your post regarding the statistics concerning a school's departure rate and this is what I was able to pull out. Did I miss Clarkson and RPI in the message? If not, could you fill in the numbers just to complete the analysis? Thanks!!!

School........Depart. Rate

Yale..................9.1%
Dartmouth.........15.6%
Colgate.............16.7%
Princeton ..........19.4%
St. Lawrence.....20.5%
Harvard............23.7%
Cornell.............34.1%
Union...............43.6%
Brown..............44.7%
Quinnipiac.........52.1%
Clarkson...........
Rensselaer........

Clarkson 33.3%
RPI 27.0%

 

[Skate79]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

The number that jumps out at me is Q-Pac's percentage. They started playing in the ECAC in the '05-06 season so to have one out of every two players recruited leave the program in such a short period of time makes you wonder what is going on. Especially since they have committed significant resources to building a hockey program including a new rink.

I like ARM's explanation because it often happens that a kid falls in love with a school during the admissions process; then reality hits when they actually have to attend classes and live on campus or nearby on a daily basis. Also, getting recruited by a coach and then playing for that same coach sometimes winds up being a very different experience. The pressures of balancing an academic schedule and playing for a team can be grueling. My friend's daughter stopped playing after one season because she wanted to pursue other interests (she loves theatre and dance) and she felt the time commitment to the team was just too much to handle given her other interests and academics.

 

[OnMAA]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

The number that jumps out at me is Q-Pac's percentage. They started playing in the ECAC in the '05-06 season so to have one out of every two players recruited leave the program in such a short period of time makes you wonder what is going on. Especially since they have committed significant resources to building a hockey program including a new rink.

I like ARM's explanation because it often happens that a kid falls in love with a school during the admissions process; then reality hits when they actually have to attend classes and live on campus or nearby on a daily basis. Also, getting recruited by a coach and then playing for that same coach sometimes winds up being a very different experience. The pressures of balancing an academic schedule and playing for a team can be grueling. My friend's daughter stopped playing after one season because she wanted to pursue other interests (she loves theatre and dance) and she felt the time commitment to the team was just too much to handle given her other interests and academics.

That Quinnipiac's number is high is not that suprising to me. This program "is going/went thru" a major rebuild recently and one of the side effects is some kids leaving the program as a result, some forced and some cause they could not handle the different approach. I firmly believe (and have heard from several sources) that the same thing (rebuild and refocus) is happening at Brown, hence the high number of departs in the last year. Both Brown and Quinnipiac have been struggling in recent years. You are starting to see the effects of the turnaround at Q in results on the ice this year. Results of a turnaround take a little time to take effect.

 

[Brown Parent]

Re: Brown Women's hockey coaching problems

That Quinnipiac's number is high is not that suprising to me. This program "is going/went thru" a major rebuild recently and one of the side effects is some kids leaving the program as a result, some force and some cause they could not handle the different approach. I firmly believe (and have heard from several sources) that the same thing (rebuild and refocus) is happening at Brown, hence the high number of departs in the last year. Both Brown and Quinnipiac have been struggling in recent years. You are starting to see the effects of the turnaround at Q in results on the ice this year. Results of a turnaround take a little time to take effect.

Quinnipiac has faced more challenges than established programs like Brown that may contribute to higher player turnover. This is only the fifth season for Quinnipiac in the ECAC and ninth overall as a D1 program. In addition, Quinnipiac, during the time period that is being evaluated, has had two different Head coaches with subsequent turnover in the assistant coaching ranks. On the upside for Quinnipiac, the current Head Coach has two years of continuity with his coaching staff and a new on-site facility. The stability of the coaching staff, on-site facility and fostering of good working relationships with the academic and administrative departments should all help in lowering turnover and creating a successful program.

Brown, on the other hand, has had only two head coaches in the last 34 years with the current head coach at the helm for the last 20 years. One would think this would give the head coach an advantage in recruiting, developing and retaining players as she would have a wealth of institutional experience in identifying those players that fit not only in the hockey culture she has created but also in the Brown community at large in a similar way that Harvard’s head coach of 16 years has been able to do.