Jack Rinzel; Balancing Development & Performance in a High School Setting

Rattlesnake Strength
Oct 16, 2024
4 min read

Balancing Development and Performance in a High School Setting

Jack Rinzel is the Head Strength Coach at Northstar Christian Academy for Men's Hockey. He was formerly an NCAA Division 1 Football Strength Coach. He holds a CSCS and an MA in Exercise Science & Sport Management. Jack has also provided many thoughts and ideas that led to Rattlesnake Strength's creation, and will continue to be a featured resource.

Balancing long term athletic development within a high performance setting as a Strength and Conditioning Coach can be a massive challenge, but if done right, with your priorities in check, you can help ensure both the short term and long term success of your athletes.

To provide some context, I currently work at a hockey academy, with two teams - 16U and 18U AAA. These athletes range from 14-18 years old and are playing hockey at a very high level, where every weekend they are playing in front of Junior and NCAA coaches in Showcases around the country, playing upward of 56 games in a 5-6 month period. So the challenge you are faced with as a coach is how in the world am I going to simultaneously develop the movement skills, power and strength capacity of these athletes, while allowing them to perform at their highest level to earn scholarships and opportunities at the next level? In order to do this I’ve listed out my priorities for this challenge. These are in no particular order, as they are all equally important considerations.

Priority 1: General Movement Skills and Strength Within Them

This seems like an obvious one but it is a non negotiable for me. My number one goal for these athletes is to send them to the next level with an unprecedented ability to control their body through space and be strong and durable in those ranges. In order to do this properly, fancy is your enemy. The best thing you can do for these athletes is structure your training with a simple template - squat, hinge, push, pull, sprint and jump. You might be wondering “Where are the lunges? Hockey players NEED unilateral work like lunges!” Do they? My kids are on the ice practicing twice per day, beyond a warmup and mobility context, I have no desire to load the frontal plane and prefer to keep the majority of our training extremely general.

In short, be a strength generalist, and perform the basics with sharp attention to detail

Priority 2: Weekly Structure and Volume

Knowing that just about every weekend for a 5-6 month period, these athletes have to play upwards of 4 games in front of scouts, keeping them fresh for these contests is extremely important. In order to do this, we keep total volumes as low as we can while ensuring we are still doing enough work to move the needle.

We aim to perform all of our lower body strength/foundational work and high stimulus sprint/plyometrics as far away from the weekend as possible - Monday or Tuesday. This ensures the soreness and fatigue is being experienced on Tuesday or Wednesday and NOT Friday or Saturday. We then perform our upper body strength/foundational work at the midweek point, as soreness and fatigue is generally much lower with these movements. Lastly, we perform our power and dynamic effort training later in the week to get the boys ready to compete over the weekend. This weekly structure works for us, in the context of our program, but it may not work for your situation. Make sure you have a plan in place with these things in mind.

Priority 3: Culture

For many of our athletes at the 16U level, this is their first time playing “big boy hockey”. We need them to buy into a style of play that requires them to get their nose dirty, play a little nasty and COMPETE. We aim to foster this mindset and attitude every single day. Battle drills at practice, opportunities to run your mouth in the weight room and have to step up and compete for your right to continue doing so.

As stated in Proverbs 27:17 - “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

On the flip side, at the 18U level, we use a lot of the same principles to lean into the current identity of the team - tough, gritty hockey. They embody that style and we want them to carry that mindset into everything that they do. This extends beyond hockey. This mindset and attitude will follow the athlete long after their playing careers are over.

These are the priorities and principles that help outline the Strength and Conditioning program at Northstar. It may look different than other places, or it may look similar, but this is what we do to help build not only great hockey players, but great men of God.