The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee named Heather Mannix its Coach Educator of the Year for 2024, an annual award with winners selected by a USOPC panel.
Mannix is the manager of education and player development for USA Hockey and has enhanced and revolutionized coaching education, although she’s quick to credit others who’ve worked with her, too.
Mannix received the good news about the award via a phone call from her boss, Bob Mancini, USA Hockey’s assistant executive director of hockey development. She said she was “completely shocked” since she didn’t know her name was submitted for the honor.
It took some time for her to process the news.
“One of the biggest things that have come from that reflection is, that maybe my name [is the one] that they gave the award to, but it’s a much bigger reflection on the organization … as a whole but particularly my boss has placed on the importance of education and educating not just our coaches but our officials as well,” Mannix said. “His vision has become our vision, and it’s my job to execute it.”
No day is the same in her line of work, and she generally has three different areas of people she works with: coaches, officials and players.
She works a lot with the coaching education program, with staff and volunteers to develop curriculum and training for coach developers to deliver the clinics to coaches. She also oversees the officiating education, developing new curriculum for training the officiating developers.
For player development, she works with hockey associations who want them to visit. They work with coaches of players as young as age 6, up through 15-17-year-olds at national development camps.
“We try to work with coaches so that it’s not just us out there for one practice working with players and then leaving, and there really isn’t a whole lot of impact,” Mannix said.
Mannix describes her journey in the hockey world a “very windy pathway” intertwining what she’s passionate about with the work she does.
Going back to her hockey roots, Mannix grew up just outside Detroit and played triple-A hockey for the Michigan Capitals, Ice Dogs and Little Caesars. Injury derailed her playing career while she was at Western Michigan University, so she finished her undergraduate degree closer to home at Wayne State University before continuing with her master’s degree at George Washington University.
She always loved physiology and as a kid wanted to be a physical therapist when she grew up.
“I loved understanding how to optimize performance and then rehabilitate after injuries, as obviously a lot of hockey players deal with injuries along the way,” Mannix said. “That was my first initial passion.”
Her introduction to sport exercise psychology came during her master’s studies, which shifted everything for her when she worked on a research project involving sport performance, exercise, and sport and exercise psychology. She was later introduced to the Coach-In-Chief for Michigan and started presenting her thesis chair’s research at Level 4 coaching clinics in Michigan.
Mannix got into the coaching education network as a volunteer with USA Hockey, which is how she initially heard about the job as player development manager for female hockey. That was her job before her current role with USA Hockey.
“Once you are in the world of hockey, it’s such a small world that the more people you know, the more doors that open,” Mannix said. “I think that I just started to walk through the doors and (stopped) finding reasons to not walk through doors. So, any time a door opened, I just tried to walk through it and see what happened next.
“The next thing you know, I’m in this position, hired and it’s six years later getting this award.”
She takes the most pride in the developer academy she’s helped create, which takes the education used and makes it strictly district based. She worked with the curriculum committee on standardizing the curriculum. Once this new curriculum was in place, the education turned into more of a facilitation-based, interactive and activity-based learning.
“It became less of a death by PowerPoint and more of a ‘How do we create activities to engage coaches knowing that the learning is a whole lot more sticky when that happens?’” Mannix said. “Creating a program to develop the people that are delivering this clinic has been a huge undertaking.”
They also had to pivot, with initial plans to roll out the new curriculum in April 2020, in what turned out to be the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the program has grown, with 15 coach developers at the first training to this year including not just coaches but officials and having 70 people attend a recent officiating developer academy.
Seeing the growth of the program is prideful, and it comes from a lot of work by people besides Mannix, she said.
“Although the award was awarded to technically me, it’s never just one person,” Mannix said. “It’s absolutely a reflection on the whole ecosystem and how they feel and value education and its impact on the overall experience for the players, which as the end of the day is what we’re all trying to improve and make the best possible.”
Story from Red Line Editorial, Inc.
Source: usahockey.com