Just imagine devoting 20 years of your life to teaching and coaching. It is your professional life. And then the job you’ve had for six years ends and you have to start over. It is never easy, even in the hockey business where it is a regular event for people who work in the game. You have to get past the emotion of the moment and focus on the future.
And so we come to David Marcoux, who devoted the past six seasons to making the goaltenders in the Calgary Flames organization better. He found out a couple of weeks before the end of June when his contract expired, that it would not be renewed.
“I know that I want to be a coach and a teacher and that I’m good at it,” he told me last week after three hours spent in a Springbank arena looking at young goaltending prospects. “I went to Montreal for the draft in June and spent three hours with Jacques Martin. I thought there would be a place for me with the Canadiens but they chose to bring in one of Jacques’ friends who’d worked with him in Ottawa and in Florida. And I learned that in the hockey business, you need to have friends who can help you and keep you in the loop.”
For the moment, at least, he will stay in Calgary where his family has settled into school, sports, and friends. “I could have gone to Austria and joined Pierre Page, the former Flames coach who now coaches the Red Bull pro team there,” he told me. “But it would have meant leaving my family here and that wasn’t an option.”
And so, he’s building a portfolio of projects to keep busy and to keep himself in the hockey loop. He has spent some time this month helping with evaluations of goaltending prospects for a variety of teams in the area. He hopes that will blossom into some camps and private coaching sessions once the season is underway. He has taken a small contract with the Moose Jaw Warriors to tutor their goaltenders: veteran Jeff Bosch, and prospect Brandon Glover. And he hopes that other teams and organizations in the area will recognize his talents and give him an opportunity.
“Certainly, there are a lot of goaltending prospects spread across the area at different stages of development,” Marcoux told me. “I think that a lot of them are getting good technical instruction. But I’ve noticed in doing evaluations of young goaltenders this month that the mental part of the game is something that they need to learn. Coaches look at body language on the ice: how a goaltender reacts if he allows a goal. They want to see a goaltender that is confident. I’ve found that if a goaltender skates onto the ice at a training camp and is concerned about what other goalies are doing, he’s not focused enough on his own game.
Dave King once told me that some goalies are just okay because they see competition from others. The good goalies see opportunities. That’s a big part of the message I’d like to be able to teach youngsters.”
It’s a good message from a good teacher. |
Life Goes On For David Marcoux
