Herbert Brooks Hockey Coach The Legend

Herbert Brooks coached the 1980 Olympic Olympic hockey team. He had skated on two Olympic teams himself, was an old college hockey coach, and spent 1979 looking for team recruits. In 1980, the US did not recruit NHL stars, because the players were still fully amateur. Herbie Brooks went to the National Sports Festival in Colorado Springs, Co in 1979 and found the players who were most willing to adapt to the style of playing hockey. His style is to skate hard and fast and work together as a team, without individual standouts. He gave them psychological and physical tests, and tried to determine which players could not play together because of intense regional competition. Hockey was strong only in a few places in the 1980s, and competition between the University of Minnesota and Boston University was very strong, culminating in the 1976 NCAA semi-finals which was one of the most disgusting college games played at that time.

Herbert Brooks Hockey Coach The Legend

Twelve young men he considered for the team were from Minnesota, and Brooks had trained nine of them at the University of Minnesota. Four from Boston University, and Brooks is not sure whether they can forget their regional loyalty to play together for the Olympic team as a true team. The East people think Brooks is very hard on them, but the people who skated under Brooks say that his motto is "I'm here to be your coach; I'm not here to be your friend." Brooks was given a whip by the team as a joke gift for Christmas.

To make the team work together, Brooks has six weeks of training camps, and then sixty-one hockey matches are played throughout Europe and America over a five-month period. Brooks manages them rudely, criticizes them, and leaves the moral building to his assistant coach. During this five-month period he repeatedly planned teams, looking for ways to play the perfect hockey game. When the team wins, he congratulates them, but continues to work on the plan. When the team is tied up, as they did in Norway, he is disgusted with the lack of effort. After the match was over, he told the players, "If you don't want to skate during the match, then you will skate afterwards." And the team does that, runs sprint skating: the finish line to the blue line and returns, the finish line to the red line and back, the finish line to the finish line and back. The crowd left, the janitor turned off the lights, and still the team slid. The next night, the team won, 9-0.

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Herbert Brooks died in a car accident on August 11, 2003. His Lake Placid team came to pay homage to a tough taskmaster, but a coach who was loved and respected. As they said in a speech, "Herbie has a dream. And the players have dreams." He chased the dream to the extraordinary gold medal team from Lake Placid in 1980.

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