Is your team tough? Or just good at suffering?

It's the first week back. Cones out, beep test app open on somebody's phone, and by Thursday half the squad has that look. Russell Coates named the whole genre in a pre-season workshop in January: "I think it's a bit of a shame to be doing endless shuffle to run beep tests. Yo yo tests. Anything you can think of. Forest runs. The good old fashioned bus loper that we used to have in Holland." A bus loper is the old Dutch shuttle-run test. Most of us have run one. Some of us have set one.

Then this:

So when we make a session hard, are we building a tough team, or finding out who was already tough and quietly losing the rest?

Three books:

Field hockey coaches at The Hockey Site:

We inherited our definition of toughness from people who were good at filtering and not much interested in teaching. Chapter 1 offers a replacement: "real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action." Almost nothing in it is about how much you can take. It's about what you can still do while taking it.

In Chapter 2 he's blunter: "Toughness isn't a sorting exercise. We need to teach the skills to handle adversity." The mistake wasn't the hardness, it was mistaking the filter for the lesson. A brutal pre-season does produce survivors, and we read them as proof the method worked, when mostly they tell us who could already cope. Hard things are still the point for Magness. The sequence just matters: teach the skill, then add the load, in doses a player can learn from.

That's roughly what Coates is doing when he separates getting better from getting drained. Pre-season without the shuffle runs isn't softer. So where does the hard part go, if not into the running?

Andreu Enrich is honest that the selling was part of why the old version lasted: "we always built in the narrative of yeah, you have to suffer, you know, we have to work hard performance, work hard, suffer this kind of very, very, very old values." The suffering wasn't a side effect. It was the story we told to make the suffering mean something.

Legacy pulls in two directions here. On one hand, "The training, decision-making wise, should be harder than the game." (Wayne Smith, quoted in James Kerr, Legacy, Ch. 8, Train to Win). On the other, the book argues that mental toughness gets trained like fitness, gradually and repeatedly, not in a one-off talk or a weekend away.

So which is it for a hockey session? Is "harder than the game" a contradiction of Magness, or the end point of his graded doses, something you reach in March rather than open with in August? Wayne Smith does say harder decision-making wise. Not harder to survive.

The two books also meet in one man. Magness uses Bobby Knight, the Indiana basketball coach, as his example of the old model, while Legacy quotes him approvingly in the same training chapter: "Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win." (Bobby Knight, quoted in James Kerr, Legacy, Ch. 8, Train to Win). Both can be true. A coach can be right about preparation and wrong about how to treat people.

Take the hardest block in your next session and ask Coates's question of it: is this getting them better, or just draining them? If it's the second, what skill would you teach first for that block to develop somebody?