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eff Serowick believes hockey is a sport comprised of small battles. Battles for loose pucks, for position in front of the net, mental battles with yourself, and of course there are the more traditional pugilistic variety that tend to pop up now and then. You might expect that from an NHL defensemen, especially one who worked his way from level to level, grinding at every turn, eventually realizing his dream of making it into the League. That journey itself is a battle. But that battle mentality is a defenseman’s default mindset. The good ones are born with it. And it’s important. It’s also at the crux of what’s being taught to aspiring young hockey players this summer inside the Jay Peak Ice Haus. It’s an approach to the game that Serowik has come to call Battle Camp, and it’s what Pro Ambitions Hockey Camps were built on.
This focus on a defensive, tough minded approach to the game is what has made Pro Ambitions a unique and very successful camp that now runs all summer in towns across the country. And now it’s coming to Jay. Says Serowik, “The Jay Peak Ice Haus offers first class facilities that will offer the perfect environment for these on ice battles to play out.” But naturally, at Jay, there’s always another angle to the story. Jay’s edition of the Pro Ambition Camp, like Jay Peak itself, is just a little different from the rest of them out there.
“Can the Zombie eyes drop below their waist?”
Here, the Boston Bruins’ assistant coach Geoff Ward will be overseeing the camp, which will focus more on the offensive side of the ice. Ward has been on the Bruins coaching staff since 2007, helping guide the team to a Stanley Cup Championship in 2011, as well as a Stanly Cup appearance this year. Once again, Jay Peak finds itself in the middle of two opposing mentalities— defensive and offensive—both with equal merit.
Pro Ambitions is the he world’s largest and perhaps best known series of summer hockey camps, all started by the aforementioned NHL defenseman and New Hampshire native, Jeff Serowik, over 20 years ago. The Battle Camp philosophy is unique in the Hockey Camp world, where most of the camps tend to focus simply on skill development. These other camps fill their days running kids through repetitive drills designed to hone technique and build muscle memory. At Pro Ambitions, the focus reaches farther than that. Here, kids learn how to develop mental toughness, and how to take advantage of that toughness on the ice in virtually every scenario.
WINTER 2013-14
At our camp, kids will get the best of both worlds. A baseline defensive approach to the game championed by Serowik, and world-class offensive instruction from one of the NHL’s top assistant coaches. We consider ourselves to be lucky for this confluence of styles to be playing out on our NHL sized ice. That’s what we put it there for. Because we believe that the best way to get better at anything, and make anything better, is to constantly seek out challenges that will test you. And for the kids at the Pro Ambitions camp this summer, we expect they’ll find exactly that kind of challenge.
JAY PEAK RESORT
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