FORT ERIE, Ont. – It was 8:30 a.m. when the celebrity instructor emerged from a dressing room normally reserved for referees. Valerie Winger and her 10-year-old son were waiting by the door, having already spent 45 minutes driving to the arena across icy roads the morning after a snowstorm.
She beamed as her son stepped in for a photo. He played atom AAA, and while he skated with an array of skills instructors in Southern Ontario, she had never seen him quite as excited as he was that day, as he prepared to spend an hour on the ice with the man known widely as Pavel Barber.
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“I only looked him up on Instagram a few months ago,” Valerie said in the arena lobby a few minutes after the photo. “I thought he was an NHL guy.”
“Yeah,” said her husband, Doug, “so did I.”
“He’s not, though,” she said. “He’s a YouTube sensation.”
Barber is a 30-year-old who played AA hockey as a child in Toronto, and he is becoming more than an online sensation. He is emerging as his own kind of industry, holding skills development camps in one town on one weekend, working with professional players in another and endorsing companies through his social media channels in between.
He has tutored Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews and Canucks winger Jake Virtanen. In some ways, Barber is an avatar for the growing industry of specialized instructors who try to distill the artistry seen every night in the NHL into a science that can be taught at a local rink.
Many of those techniques end up online, where Barber can post a video of a hapless beer league goalie flailing after shootout attempts. In one recent post, Barber picks the puck up between his legs with the blade of his stick, rotates one-and-a-half times on his way to the net, and somehow flicks the puck into the open cage from behind his back.
More than 545,000 users follow that account on Instagram.
Barber has more than 200,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, which is a repository for tricks, tips and technical minutiae curated by a lifelong hockey obsessive. He was the hockey fan who made notes, then took his notebook to the local outdoor rink to test drive what he had written down.
“From my perspective as a layman, I watch these guys do this and I’m like, ‘Oh, that is magic,’ or, ‘That’s artistic,’” said his father, Brad. “But he’s able to take the art and know there’s a science behind it: ‘He’s doing this on his edge,’ and this and that.”
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“He does a great job in being able to take plays that happen in games and break it down into the skill,” said Corey McNabb, manager of player development for Hockey Canada.
And he has done it largely without his real name.
Pavel is his nom de guerre. According to his driver’s license, and to everyone who would have known him growing up in the Riverdale neighbourhood of Toronto, he is Brandon Barber.
He grew up as a talented, if slightly smaller, minor hockey player. Barber was still in atom when news of his scoring exploits first appeared in the Toronto Star. Soon, there were more stories of how well he played in ball hockey, field hockey and baseball. (One local outlet ran a photo of Barber as a teenager, standing next to a trophy case that was filled higher than he stood.)
Withrow Park was two minutes from where he lived. In the winter, he would be on the ice both before school and afterward. Sometimes, he would skip school altogether to spend the day alone on the ice as the rest of the city went to work. (Brad Barber was unaware of his son’s past truancy. “I know now,” he said with a laugh. “But he still passed. Go figure.”)
Pavel Datsyuk was his idol. The Russian forward might not have accumulated the points of his higher-profile peers, but his complement of skills inspired awe. Barber would watch video to break down the individual skills Datsyuk built into a move, and then he would practise them: How did Datsyuk beat a defender one-on-one? How did he control the puck?
“When I was growing up, I wanted answers to those questions,” Barber said. “And there wasn’t really anything online that answered those questions for me.”
He used Pavel as a placeholder name for a new YouTube channel, and it stuck.
“People call me Pavel all the time,” Barber said with a smile. “And I won’t even correct them.”
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Has he ever met Datsyuk in person?
“I fist-bumped him once,” he said.
There were 22 skaters on the ice for the first morning session at the Fort Erie Leisureplex. It was one of 11 sessions scheduled that weekend. The advertised price for an hour with Barber was $55, and most of the players on the ice at 9 a.m. were still in their most formative years of minor hockey.
And many of those children would have worked with other skills coaches.
“It is becoming much more specialized,” said McNabb, the Hockey Canada official. “And they’re everywhere. I don’t think it matters which major city in Canada you’re in — there’s some competition for people trying to get kids in.”
Coaches working under the Hockey Canada umbrella are required to undergo training depending on the level they are coaching. That process does not apply to independent skills development coaches and the camps they sometimes run.
McNabb said Hockey Canada has begun staging summer clinics for skills coaches who want an official stamp of approval from the national governing body. They have to apply to attend the week-long clinics in Calgary, where they work with emerging trends in skating, puck-handling, shooting and specialized positional play.
It is an exclusive event, with room for only about 20 attendees. McNabb said 86 coaches have taken the course since it launched four summers ago, and that while some will work with elite clientele, most would be teaching in a minor hockey setting.
“I think the ones who have the biggest impact are these professional skills guys who are working with your eight-to-16-year-old range,” McNabb said. “Because that’s where you can really make the biggest difference on their development.”
Scott Oakman, the executive director of the Greater Toronto Hockey League, said the organization has discussed whether it should create some kind of approval process for skills coaches. In the meantime, he suggested parents know that “first and foremost, that their child’s hockey experience should be first about fun, and second about development.”
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Barber has not attended the Hockey Canada summer camp, but he said he does believe in the credential process. His curriculum has developed over time, and he takes it seriously. (There were four coaches on the ice with him in Fort Erie, and the skaters got plenty of repetitions during drills.)
They did not work on picking the puck up between the legs. Barber said he does not teach students the low-percentage tricks just for the sake of it. He teaches moves and tactics and, more than that, when it makes the most sense to employ them in a game.
“A lot of the stuff we do, if you come to my camps, you’ll probably be shocked,” he said. “It’s a lot of basic stuff. But we try to do the basic stuff very, very well, to have that fundamental ability lead to you being able to do the high-end stuff.”
Back in the referee’s room, Barber was in sneakers and a thick wool sweater. He lives in Vancouver, but travels the world. He has been to Japan and China, to Sweden and to points across North America. He smiled: “I think I’ve created a little bit of a new kind of profession in the stick-handling field, in focusing and emphasizing the importance of being able to handle a puck.”
Valerie and Doug Winger were waiting in the lobby while their son got dressed for his session. It was still grey outside, and a half-dozen area residents were using the concourse around the main rink as an indoor walking track on a cold morning.
They were not sure exactly how their son first found Barber.
“He just Googles hockey stuff all the time,” Valerie said with a shrug. “Pavel probably came up, and since then, he’s been watching the videos.”
He shows the videos to his parents, marvelling at how Barber transforms his stick into a magic wand on the ice. That was part of what lured them across the icy roads early on a Sunday morning.
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“He does all these tricks and stuff — things they know they can’t do,” she said. “They look up to him, right? Because he can do the stuff they can’t do. He’s still trying to just pick up the puck with his stick.”
(Top photo: Sean Fitz-Gerald / The Athletic)
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