In this episode of the Coretex Athletic Review, I head west to examine a 26-year longitudinal study tracking the physiological profile of one particular NHL franchise from 1979 to 2005.

The researchers followed the team through five Stanley Cup championships, collecting pre-season data on body composition, anaerobic power, aerobic capacity, grip strength, abdominal endurance, and flexibility.

The common assumption is that championships track with physiological dominance. Bigger, stronger, more powerful teams should win more banners.

But when we isolate the five championship seasons within the dataset, something unexpected appears.

Those dynasty teams were not at the top of the 26-year physiological distribution.

The largest players.
The highest peak anaerobic outputs.
The greatest absolute VO2 values.

Those all came later.

Without banners.

So if physiological escalation does not neatly predict championships, what does?

This episode explores:

• Longitudinal changes in NHL player size and performance from 1979–2005

• Positional physiological differences between defensemen, forwards, and goaltenders

• The relationship between pre-season fitness and team success

• And the question that remains when the engines are optimized… what about the drivers?

Research Article Reviewed:
Quinney, H.A., Dewart, R., Game, A., Snydmiller, G., Warburton, D., & Bell, G. (2008). A 26 year physiological description of a National Hockey League team. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 33, 753–760.

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In this episode, I examine the physiological profile of elite ice hockey goaltenders through the lens of a 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Exercise Science.

While much of the goaltending literature focuses on perceptual and psychological performance — anticipation, reaction timing, and decision-making — this paper compiles the limited but growing body of research examining the physical and physiological characteristics of the position.

• Why goaltenders are often excluded from broader hockey physiology research

• The structure of a systematic review and what PRISMA means

• Anthropometric comparisons between professional and amateur goaltenders

• Aerobic capacity (VO₂max) differences across levels

• Anaerobic peak power findings

• Grip strength, abdominal endurance, and flexibility

• What standardized fitness testing captures — and what it likely misses

• Professional male goaltenders were not meaningfully taller than amateurs in the pooled data.

• Amateur male goalies showed higher VO₂max values than professionals.

• Professional goalies demonstrated greater relative peak anaerobic power.

• Grip strength and core endurance appeared stronger in professional goalies.

• Flexibility distinguished goalies from skaters but did not clearly separate levels.

• Standardized lab testing may not fully capture position-specific performance demands.

This episode focuses on physiological profiling within the goaltender position.

Part 2 will zoom out to examine physiological differences between forwards, defensemen, and goaltenders at the NHL level.

Marcotte-L’Heureux, V., Charron, J., Panenic, R., & Comtois, A. S. (2021).
Ice Hockey Goaltender Physiology Profile and Physical Testing: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
International Journal of Exercise Science.

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Next week: positional physiology at the NHL level.

In this episode, I walk through a recent doctoral dissertation from the University of Alberta examining the rise of independent (non-sanctioned) youth hockey in Alberta.

Rather than debating which system is “better,” this episode takes a slower, more deliberate approach. The goal is to faithfully unpack the research as it was written, section by section, and understand how parents, coaches, and directors explain and justify their involvement in independent hockey environments.

Only after working through the paper in full do I offer my own reflections—clearly marked as opinion—based on a decade of experience coaching and directing within the sanctioned hockey system in Alberta.

• What “sanctioned” vs “non-sanctioned” hockey actually means in Alberta

• Why independent hockey has expanded in recent years

• How development is understood, marketed, and justified across different stakeholders

• The role of prolympic values (performance, efficiency, optimization) in youth sport

• How parents navigate uncertainty and responsibility in pathway decisions

• Why coaches experience both autonomy and constraint in independent systems

• How directors frame hockey as a market and a product

• Why development language can coexist with performance-driven practices

• The risks of silo-fication and diluted competition environments

The episode is based on a 194-page PhD dissertation completed in 2025 by Dallas Ansell at the University of Alberta:

From the Outdoor Rink to Development Incorporated: Parent, Coach, and Director Navigation of Player Development in the Prolympic Field of Independent Youth Hockey

The study uses:

• Qualitative interviews with parents, coaches, and directors

• Observations of practices and games

• A sociological framework grounded in Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and doxa

Importantly, the paper:

• Does not measure performance outcomes

• Does not claim one system develops players better

• Does not assign blame to any single group

It focuses on meaning, justification, and structure, not solutions.

In the final section of the episode, I share my own concern—not about the existence of alternative hockey options, but about the fragmentation of elite talent across multiple parallel systems.

When top players rarely encounter true best-on-best competition, match quality suffers, assessment becomes noisy, and perceived skill can become inflated.

As one downstream signal, I reference my own long-term tracking of Alberta-born representation on Canada men's national junior ice hockey team rosters. While not evidence of causation, the trend raises questions worth asking—especially when considered alongside increasing population share and growing pathway fragmentation.

World Junior selection reflects player cohorts from nearly two decades earlier, and population growth does not translate cleanly into hockey participation—particularly in immigration-driven provinces. This is not a one-to-one comparison, but a signal that merits further examination rather than a definitive conclusion.

This episode is not about defending or attacking any league, association, or governing body. It’s about understanding how youth hockey systems evolve, how choices are justified, and what unintended consequences may emerge over time when development and performance become increasingly intertwined.

We often hear that “you never forget how to ride a bike.”But in sport, that saying hides an important qualifier.

In this episode of the Coretex Athletic Review, Evan Kurylo examines a recent 2025 meta-analytic review on procedural skill retention and decay to explore what actually happens to athletic skills during periods of non-use or intermittent use.

Rather than asking whether skills disappear, the research asks a more precise question: which aspects of performance are most vulnerable when a skill isn’t being used regularly?

The answer turns out to be less about forgetting and more about loss of precision, consistency, and calibration.

• Why common sayings (like “the customer is always right” or “you never forget how to ride a bike”) often lose important qualifiers over time

• What procedural skills are — and why they differ from simply “knowing” something

• What a large-scale meta-analysis can (and cannot) tell us about skill retention

• Evidence that procedural skills are retained, but not static

• Why accuracy and precision are more vulnerable than raw execution or speed

• How patterns of use matter more than time passing alone

• A cautionary note on skill scaling — why retained skills may still need recalibration as strength, speed, or body size changes

• Why offseason decisions depend heavily on goals, context, and training culture

• Procedural Skill Retention and Decay (2025)A meta-analytic review published by the American Psychological AssociationAuthors: Christopher Tatel & Philip Ackerman

This paper synthesizes findings from hundreds of studies across sport, medical training, military tasks, transportation, and laboratory motor learning to model how procedural skill performance changes following periods of non-use or intermittent use.

Procedural skills don’t simply disappear when practice stops.What changes first is how precisely and consistently those skills are expressed — and, in many sports, whether they’re still appropriately scaled to the athlete’s current physical system.

Retention is not the same as readiness.

The Coretex Athletic Review examines one piece of research per episode and breaks it down without hype, prescriptions, or shortcuts.

New episodes release every Thursday at 6:00 a.m. Mountain Time.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch on YouTube.Coretex Goaltender Development is currently rebranding to Coretex Athletics, continuing its focus on goaltender development while expanding into athletic research and education.

Are goaltenders really “wired differently”?
Are defensemen calmer by nature?
Are forwards inherently more volatile?

In this episode of the Coretex Athletic Review, I examine a peer-reviewed study that puts long-standing hockey stereotypes under the microscope—not by testing performance or brain activity, but by exploring how players perceive each other.

Using a social-psychology lens, this episode looks at whether perceived personality differences between hockey positions reflect true dispositional differences—or whether they are products of role demands, social identity, and in-group bias.

• Why hockey positions function as powerful social categories

• The Big Five personality framework and how it’s used in sport psychology

• How players rate themselves versus how they rate positions

• Common stereotypes associated with forwards, defensemen, and goaltenders

• Evidence of in-group bias across positions

• Why perceived differences are stronger than actual personality differences

• How coaches may unintentionally confuse role demands with personality traits

The strongest differences weren’t found in who players are—but in how players see each other.

This episode is less about proving stereotypes right or wrong, and more about understanding how they form, why they persist, and how they influence coaching, communication, and athlete development.

Personality Traits and Stereotypes Associated with Ice Hockey Positions
Cameron, J. E., Cameron, J. M., Dithurbide, L., & Lalonde, R.
Published in Journal of Sport Behavior (2012)

Elite sport moves fast.

Athletes can be central figures in their sport one season and largely absent from the competitive conversation only a few years later. This episode explores what happens not just after sport ends, but what is quietly happening during an athlete’s prime that shapes how difficult the transition becomes.

Using a recent doctoral dissertation by Amanda Workman-Vickers (2025, West Texas A&M University), this episode examines how collegiate athletes experience the transition from being an athlete to becoming something else — and why that transition is often destabilizing without being pathological.

• The fleeting nature of status in elite sport

• Why performance often becomes a primary source of self-worth before retirement

• The concept of identity limbo

• Why sadness and gratitude frequently coexist during transition

• The importance of natural vs abrupt career endings

• How simple exit meetings can provide meaningful closure

• Study type: Qualitative, phenomenological doctoral dissertation

• Participants: 10 NCAA Division II athletes

• Sports represented: Football, basketball, baseball/softball, track & field

• Career endpoint: All athletes exhausted eligibility or graduated

Rather than framing retirement as a mental health crisis, this study highlights how identity destabilization often reflects a mismatch between the speed of high-performance systems and the slower pace of human identity adaptation.

Most athletes don’t break when sport ends.
But when performance has been doing identity work for years, the sudden loss of feedback, structure, and role clarity can leave athletes temporarily unanchored.

This episode is not a critique of sport systems — it’s an examination of how they function, and how athletes experience the transition when the system inevitably moves on.

Host: Evan Kurylo
Podcast: Coretex Athletic Review
Release Schedule: Weekly — Thursdays at 6:00 AM MST

Basketball, Goalies, and Perception–Action Asymmetries

Why might basketball be a useful complementary sport for hockey goaltenders?

In this episode, I explore that question through the lens of perception, not conditioning or skill transfer in the traditional sense. The discussion starts with multi-sport participation and why transfer appears more likely when sports share similar perceptual problems, even if the movements themselves are different.

Using an older, Russian psychology paper as a starting point, I look at how athletes’ perception of space may become directionally tuned based on the demands of their sport. The study compared young basketball and hockey players and found that spatial representation differed depending on whether the sport primarily operated in the vertical plane (basketball) or the horizontal plane (hockey).

The authors described this pattern using the term reverse perspective—a label that feels clunky and unintuitive today, but which helped surface an important idea: perception does not develop evenly. Instead, it adapts around the actions and spatial problems athletes are repeatedly asked to solve.

From there, the episode reframes the findings using a more modern concept: perception–action asymmetries. Rather than viewing these patterns as perceptual errors or distortions, they can be understood as functional adaptations—certain dimensions of space are weighted more heavily because they matter more for successful action.

The episode then brings this idea back to goaltending, examining how hockey heavily emphasizes horizontal information while still requiring accurate reads in the vertical plane through screens, tips, release height, and rebounds. Basketball is discussed not as a solution or fix, but as a different perceptual environment that may expose goalies to vertical spatial problems in ways hockey does not consistently provide.

Importantly, this episode does not argue that playing basketball will improve shot-height recognition or replace hockey-specific training. Instead, it offers a conceptual framework for thinking about athlete development: what perceptual problems are athletes actually being asked to solve, and which ones might they rarely encounter?

The goal is not prescription, but perspective.

Quiet Eye Isn’t Quiet | How Elite Athletes Actually See

We tend to think of vision as clear, continuous, and camera-like.
In reality, it’s fragmented, selective, and heavily constructed by the brain.

In this episode, I explore how elite athletes use their eyes under pressure — and why traditional “Quiet Eye” explanations fall short when applied to fast, open sports like hockey.

Using a landmark on-ice eye-tracking study by Martell & Vickers (2004), we break down how expert defenders don’t simply hold their gaze longer, but instead use a rapid-to-stable cascade of visual attention: quick sampling early, followed by a final stabilizing fixation before action.

This episode reframes Quiet Eye not as a single moment, but as the final phase of a much more dynamic perceptual process.

• Why most of your visual field is blurry — and why you never notice

• How the brain fills in blind spots and missing information

• What “Quiet Eye” really means in closed vs open sports

• Why team-sport gaze research produced conflicting coaching advice

• How this study used live, on-ice eye tracking instead of video simulations

• Key differences between elite and near-elite visual behavior

• Why elite athletes succeed with shorter fixations, not longer ones

• The idea of a “quick-then-quiet” gaze cascade

• Implications for hockey, goaltending, and skill development

• Why training vision requires humility, not simple prescriptions

Elite vision isn’t calm from the start — it’s efficient.

Experts sample information rapidly, recognize patterns early, and only settle into a longer, stabilizing gaze once the situation collapses and action is inevitable.

Quiet Eye still matters — but it’s earned, not forced.

Martell, S. G., & Vickers, J. N. (2004).
Gaze characteristics of elite and near-elite athletes in ice hockey defensive tactics.
Human Movement Science, 22, 689–712.

The Coretex Athletic Review explores sport science, perception, and performance through the lens of real research — with a bias toward practical relevance for coaches, athletes, and practitioners.