In a country where the sport of hockey comes pretty close to being the nation’s official religion and our one unifying cultural institution, young fanatics have no end of information sources on their hockey heroes and advice on how to emulate them. Of course, the publishers of books for kids in Canada have never been blind to this fact, and over the years have churned out works on hockey in numbers that would surely stagger the imagination of people in other countries. This year is no exception, and three books deserve recognition for the ways they have attempted to meld this national sports obsession with the unique requirements of books for young readers.

One of these books doesn’t quite make it past the minor leagues, however. Hockey Goaltending for Young Players: An Instructional Guide is billed as “an essential one-volume guide for coaches, parents and young players.” However, author François Allaire, a long-time goalie coach for the Montreal Canadiens and currently a consultant with several NHL goalkeepers, has produced a book that will reach only about half of that intended audience: this is not a book for kids. A translation of Allaire’s 1995 Devenir gardien de but au hockey, this tome is chock full of diagrams, photos, charts, and drills, all of which are designed to develop a comprehensive four-year plan (with an emphasis on a pretty serious approach to training and competing) for building young goalies from ages nine to12. The problem is that instead of getting kids excited about stopping pucks between the pipes, this is a work to be read by an adult and then “distilled” for youngsters. Hockey Goaltending for Young Players is far too full of stodgy, training-camp material, and packs little of the fun stuff that young players need to help them improve. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with coaching manuals, but they should be presented as such, and not as books for kids. In addition, a number of technical problems put this work far beyond the interest levels of most young budding hockey stars. Most of the the photos are too small and too dark to be any help – it’s hard to tell just what the goalies are doing inside all those pads. A good portion of the diagrams, too, will be completely incomprehensible to anyone without an advanced coaching certificate and a microscope. Hockey Goaltending for Young Players does have something to add to the broader field of helping young players develop as goalies, but it will serve their adult mentors far better. Indeed, the book’s hefty price tag even suggests that such an audience may have been more what the publisher had in mind.

A far more kid-friendly approach to reaching and teaching budding Patrick Roys and Paul Kariyas is to be found between the covers of two volumes in the Hockey the NHL Way series: Goaltending and Goal Scoring, both by Sean Rossiter. While these books may take old-fashioned Canadian hero-worship-of hockey-stars techniques a little far at times, they nevertheless hit right at the heart of what attracts kids to pro sports in the first place. Huge glossy photos of all of the big-time players dominate these NHL-sanctioned books, and are used as eye-catching hooks to drive home the various important points of hockey development.

The photos are accompanied by snippets of personal advice from the stars (like Peter Forsberg’s counsel about creating scoring chances: “Look at the holes and not at the goalie”) and interesting tidbits about how the great ones got that way (“Ron Hextall became a better goalie when he learned to control his temper.”) In all, this is really the kind of material that kids look to when they dream about playing in the lights of the Montreal Forum or Maple Leaf Gardens, and it’s mixed with a solid dose of practical drills, training techniques, and even a bit of motivational advice and tips on how to psych yourself up for games and practices. Certainly, these two instalments in the Hockey the NHL Way series come close to achieving the ideal mix of instruction and fun.