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28 // MONTH HERE 2019 USAHOCKEYMAGAZINE.COM 28 // SEPTEMBER 2019 A Special ADM Round Up EFFORT EFFORT A TEAM In addition to the "original six " regional managers for the American Development Model, it takes a team effort to reach as many USA Hockey member clubs over the course of the hockey season. Under the direction of Kevin McLaughlin, senior director for hockey development, and Ken Martel, technical director of the ADM, they have put together a group of talented individuals whose passion for their jobs is matched only by the experience each of them brings to the table. Here are a few thoughts from some of other ADM regional managers doing great things every day for hockey in this country. KEN MARTEL ADM TECHNICAL DIRECTOR You were on the ground floor of putting this all together. What were your expectations for the American Development Model? Really, that we could make an impact in changing our sport for the better. It's not like things were awful in a lot of areas, but you're always looking to make it better. How can we, as USA Hockey, help impact what's going on across our country? We don't want to be just a good hockey playing nation. We want to be the world's best hockey playing nation. That's the long- term goal. You do that by sharing information with the people who are involved in our sport. What you were looking for when you hired the orig- inal group of ADM regional managers? We were looking for people that had worked at a level in the game that gave them some street cred. We wanted people who were good communicators but are also really passionate about USA Hockey and are also passionate about youth hockey. We have such a great staff and every one of them has their unique characteristics, areas that they 're more comfortable with or have deeper knowledge of because that's kind of who they are. To have different thoughts and ideas, and have holes poked in those ideas by other people that you really respect is a lot of fun. It's also very challenging because you better know what you're better know what you're talking about. In some of your early pre sentations to various youth hockey organizations, you used that anal- ogy of John F. Kennedy's pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and how that relates to changing the culture of youth hockey in this countr y. As we celebrate the 50th anni- versary of man walking on the moon, can you talk about how far we've come in changing the culture in the game? We looked at what we were doing as an organization as this massive endeavor because we were trying to affect the entire culture of our sport, to make changes across the entire nation. And the scale of this is something that no organization had never really done before. There were similarities between how President Kennedy, just four months into his presidency, said, 'we are going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade,' and the technology hadn't even been invented to do this yet. There were a lot of people at the time that were not happy with this, but the legacy of that and the technologies that were developed and pushed into other fields. The legacy of that prog ra m today is what I hope that the legacy of our ADM program. We've made pretty good progress, but the scale of what that moon mission was and the scale of what we thoug ht our under ta k ing wa s going to have to be was similar. What's your elevator speech when describing what is the American Development Model? The American Development Model is a high performance framework for developing kids in sport. It's pretty simple and straightforward. It encompasses a lot of things in that statement. Regional Managers Cover The Country Spreading The Gospel Of The ADM BONUS DIGITAL CONTENT