How coaching, concussions, and my own kids changed how I saw the game
For a stretch of years, I was living two lives at once. I was a firefighter, and off shift I was coaching, running skills camps, doing video analysis for players, and training junior, college, and pro players. Hockey never really left me just because I stopped playing it for a living. I just moved from the ice to the bench, and then to a laptop breaking down game film.
How it started
Somewhere in that stretch, I started paying closer attention to concussions. Not just the short-term version everyone already knew: get your bell rung, sit out a shift, get back out there. I started reading about traumatic brain injuries and CTE, and what repeated hits can do to a person over decades, not just over a weekend.
Then it got personal. I started thinking about my own head. I was never diagnosed with a long list of concussions, but that almost made it worse in a way, because it made me wonder how many I actually had that never got called what they were. I played hockey, football, baseball, and soccer growing up. I started asking myself what all of that had actually done to my brain over the years, and I did not love not knowing the answer.
On top of that, I became a parent. My daughter was playing soccer at the time, and my son was playing football and hockey. You think about risk differently when it is your own kid standing at the blue line instead of you. Suddenly this was not an abstract question about the sport. It was a question about my own children.
So I went with what I knew. I knew hockey, and I knew that the only way anybody was really teaching contact and checking was the old-school way, the same way I was taught when I was a kid: figure it out, take your lumps, learn on the fly. I decided there had to be a better way to teach it.
Building a better way
That is how 4Check Hockey came together. We developed a program built around custom dummies that slide on the ice, so we can build drills that feel like real game situations instead of static, unrealistic reps. Players get to make mistakes, get hit, get out of position, and learn from all of it, without the risk of a real injury while they are figuring it out.
Since then, we have kept developing the equipment itself. The dummies now hold sticks, so they are not just something to hit anymore. Coaches use them for stickhandling, shooting, passing, goalie screening, and honestly just about anything else you can think of. The kids even trash talk them a little, which always gets a laugh in the rink.
We did not stop with the players, either. We train the coaches too, because if you want players learning good habits after we leave, the people running practice every week need those tools in their own hands. It is the same logic as a good school: if you want good students, you need good teachers. So we invest heavily in the coaches at every organization we work with.
Then we went to the parents. I know firsthand how much influence a parent has on how a kid sees risk, injury, and their own body. So we give parents real resources, not just a pamphlet, so they can actually understand what a concussion is and what to watch for.
Put all of that together and you get a full-service program: players, coaches, parents, and organizations, all working from the same information and the same tools.
Why it matters beyond the hit
People hear "checking program" and assume it is only about teaching kids to hit harder. It is really about teaching body contact, awareness, and confidence as their own skills, the same way you would coach a wrist shot or a crossover. A player who understands how to give and absorb contact is not just safer. They read the ice better, protect the puck better, and stop hesitating in the exact moments when hesitation gets you hurt. Checking is really just the most visible piece of a much bigger skill: knowing your body in traffic, at speed, with other bodies coming at you.
That is also why we do not treat this as a boys-only program. We train girls as well as boys, and contact has become far more common in girls hockey over the past several years, whether the rest of the hockey world has fully caught up to that or not. Watching the girls go through these drills is one of my favorite parts of the job. They have a blast, no pun intended, and they are smiling ear to ear the whole session.
The most rewarding part of all of it is watching a player who walked in scared or hesitant turn into one who trusts his or her own body and competes with confidence. As a parent myself, there is nothing quite like watching a kid learn something hard and come out the other side more sure of who they are.
And through all of it, we make sure to have fun. We joke around. We turn the music on in the rink whenever we can. When a kid falls, we celebrate it, because that is exactly when the learning happens. If you let the mistakes happen and actually learn from them, you get better. That is what we chase every single day at 4Check Hockey, and it is why I believe this kind of training belongs in every rink, for every player who wants to compete without fear.