Why a perfect preseason is the wrong goal for a hockey coach

Two weeks before the first whistle, Tin Matkovic had his season mapped out. Trainings, friendlies, travel, gym slots, medical cover, squad groups, the lot. Spreadsheets inside spreadsheets, a plan A, a plan B and usually a plan C. And then two important players got injured before the opening game.

That is the paradox at the heart of his masterclass. He plans in obsessive detail, and he fully expects reality to ignore the plan. "In reality, it's always different than on paper, but planning till perfection, I think, gives you this idea of safety," he says. The plan is not a prediction. It is the thing that lets you stay calm when the prediction fails.

Tin coaches in Germany with a squad of 25 plus players who all have jobs, studies and lives outside hockey. His season planning problem is the same one most club coaches have, just with a bit more staff around it. So this session is less about elite structures and more about how you think when nothing lines up neatly.

Most coaches think of planning and improvising as opposites. Tin treats them as the same skill. The more completely you have thought a season through, the faster you can rebuild it when something breaks.

His starting point is not a training programme. It is a set of questions. "I like to work with a lot of questions. So I ask myself and my team, what do we need and how are we going to get this?" Then he fills in the answers across strategy, performance, planning, medical, recruitment and tactics. Notice what that list is: only one of those six is hockey. That is deliberate.

He is explicit about the order. First you build the actual plan, meaning the organisational one: athletic trainer, team manager, coach, the calendar from the end of last season through the preseason to the end of the first part of the competition. Are we travelling, are we not travelling, do we have money, do we pay for a gym, is the hall available, how do we get to an away game 800 kilometres away and what does each option cost in fatigue and in budget. Only once that skeleton exists does he build the hockey on top of it: on-ball and off-ball principles, transition, setup play, the game model, the rules that go into the playbook.

That sequence matters. Coaches love starting with the hockey, because that is the fun part. Tin's point is that the hockey plan is worthless if the logistics underneath it collapse. His example this season is almost comic: the indoor hall was being rebuilt, so they lost their gym, so they bought a container and put it on the property, and then had to improvise on the improvisation because they had not solved what happens when it rains and the equipment gets destroyed. "We needed to improvise of the improvisation." Everyone who has coached at a club knows that feeling.

To stop the planning from swallowing him, he uses the Eisenhower method: what has to be done now, what can wait, what we let go, and what we delegate. He is careful about what "let go" means. "Let go doesn't mean we're forgetting about it. It says like, okay, at this very moment, we think as a team, that this is not going to influence that much, so we can deal with it later."

The part that is most useful for coaches with any kind of support around them is his take on urgency being personal. "A million people will have million different ideas of what is for them the most urgent and most important thing." For him it might be building the perfect hockey plan. For his team manager it is the away venue. If both people assume their own priority is the shared priority, the staff pulls in different directions. So the Eisenhower grid is not a solo productivity trick here. It is a conversation the staff has together, so everyone knows whose urgent is whose, and then they report back to each other weekly.

He works without a fixed assistant coach, using what he calls consultants, people from several countries who come in to Stuttgart where he coaches. That forces alignment meetings: strategy, tactics, game plan, systems, scenarios. And it forces him to separate roles, the hockey nerds who only think about hockey, and a specific person who owns team behaviour, team principles and how those connect to the club's principles. When you rebuild a squad every year, that second job is not a soft extra. It is the thing that makes the group function.

Then comes the loop that ties it together. Tin calls it test, review, adapt. Every friendly has a topic. You test something, you review it with data and with the players, you adapt. "In the preseason, I'm totally okay with people making mistakes, with trying out new stuff, trying out something that maybe the team wants to do, as long as we have a review." The permission to fail is conditional on the review actually happening. Without the review, a bad friendly is just a bad friendly.

And the final piece is the one that keeps the whole system honest.

When something breaks anyway, and it will, his instruction to himself is: "Why stress about something that you cannot change? Past is the past. Think about the future, make sure that you can adapt." Let it be.