Cut It Down to Here

I first discovered the value of good posture as a high-school hockey player. One summer our coach hired a figure-skating instructor to help our team skate better. If you boil hockey down the way Bull Durham boils down baseball, it's a simple game: you skate to the puck, you pass the puck, you shoot the puck. We started at square one and learned, in excruciating detail, what it means to be an excellent skater rather than a good one. At first it felt ridiculous, and I suppose that was the point. We learned better balance, how to use our edges, and how to get more speed from each stride. Most of it was about having good posture for better leverage and strength.

Later that summer I was given the single most important piece of advice in my soon-to-be-completed hockey career. I was talking with a former pro at a charity event, and my mom (aw, geez) prompted me to ask him for advice on scoring. He stood back and looked me up and down and chuckled gently. I am not a very big person. Given my scarce physical presence, he asked, "How tall is your stick?"

I had always been told the correct height of a stick was between your chin and your nose with the toe on the ground, and I had the impression a longer stick mattered for a hard shot. I indicated my nose. He smiled and chopped his hand at mid-chest. "Cut it down to here. Do that and park yourself on the side of the crease and you'll score buckets."

We all chuckled and thoroughly embarrassed, I mumbled thanks, and I walked away. After recovering from my humiliation, I told my best friend and teammate the story as if I'd been pranked. He said, "Why not give it a try? Maybe he was serious."

Before games teams line their sticks up along the wall outside the locker room. My trepidation deepens when I saw how quickly mine stood out by being so short. It looked like it belonged to a PeeWee. But you know what? It worked! Instead of playing out from the net as I always had, I stood right behind the usual defenseman and became unexpectedly annoying to the goaltender by standing right on the crease. Like a gnat that makes you swat yourself in frustration. When people shot, I could get my shorter stick right on the rebounds and push them back into the net. I hardly had to shoot, but they went in a lot. I went from an also-ran too-small player to the leading scorer in my state in one season.

There wasn't much skill or thought required to increase my scoring production. Most of it was simply position.

I have spent the years since learning the same lesson in other places. In yoga, where I can't get my body into most of the poses as they're modeled and need a bolster under my leg or a block to sit on. In organizations, where the frameworks I use with clients do the same thing the skating instructor did: they don't make you good, they put you in a position where good becomes possible, and then you practice that to get better.

The pro was right, and my friend was righter: Try it. Maybe he was serious.