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Key Lessons from Wild’s Second Half Surge

By Minnesota Hockey, 03/31/15, 11:00AM CDT

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Confidence can be a fickle thing: some days you have it, some days you don’t.

Just ask the Minnesota Wild. Right now, the team is as confident as ever. They’re scoring goals, playing team defense and consistently performing at a high level, resulting in an NHL-best 26-6-2 record since January 15th.

“It’s very important,” Wild defenseman and former Armstrong Falcon Jordan Leopold said. “When you feel good, you tend to do things a little bit better, with a little bit more energy, a little bit more oomph.”

From mites to the pros, having confidence team-wide is fun. But it’s not an easy thing to maintain, both as a team and individually.

“It can be crazy,” Leopold said. “It depends on what kind of mood you’re in. Up, down, whatever it is. I think for us, being professionals, it’s part of preparation; it’s part of routine. … A lot of that does bounce around confidence. You score a couple goals, you’re a little higher. You have a couple goals scored against, you’re a little lower. If you can find a good medium ground and be humble about things, it will all take care of itself.”

Leopold noted, as an NHL-er, he’s lucky in that if his confidence is low, he has the luxury to watch film of something he does well and start to rebuild his self-assurance. But the easiest way for younger players to find some renewed confidence is to simply get back out on the ice.

“Just get back out there and get back it,” Leopold said. “If you have a bad game, the best thing is you play again."

“Practice habits are big. You go out there and try to do things that you know you either have been struggling with or haven’t been doing as well, and try to work on them. The more you do a repetition over and over, the more you feel better and more confident about it. You build that through practices and hopefully it will translate to games.”

Wild forward and former Golden Gopher Erik Haula added that having a positive environment is also key to one’s confidence. Rather than having negative reinforcement, staying positive – and receiving encouragement from coaches, friends and family – can make a huge difference.

“I feel like everyone goes through that, not just in hockey,” Haula said. “You’re going to have those days where things just don’t go your way. But you just have to keep trying to do the right things and have a good environment around you. I feel like that’s really important for younger kids, that they don’t have negative reinforcement around them.”

So while a high level of confidence isn’t constant, it can be rebuilt – as the Wild has proved this season. For Minnesota, it was a matter of feeding off someone who felt good about their game. But they continued to work hard and turned their season around.

If you put in the effort and preparation, eventually the confidence, and success, will come.

“The biggest thing is you just have to push through it,” Leopold said. “The thing is, in hockey and in life, if you have bad times, they always seem to pass. It sometimes takes time and you have to be able to realize that and know that it will. It’s just a matter of getting through it and looking ahead and not behind.”

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