The Canucks’ secret prospect weapon is … sports psychology

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It’s pretty hard to argue with what Alex Hodgins has seen and done.

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He has been to the Olympics. He has worked with our national women’s soccer team and superstar Christine Sinclair.

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He’s worked with the Vancouver Whitecaps.

He’s worked with the Vancouver Canucks.

He knows elite sport. So it only makes sense that the Canucks deploy him to work with their yearly intake of new prospects at the team’s annual summer development camp.

Where once the idea of sports psychology was foreign to most elite athletes — maybe only an experience for the best of the best — now players begin to learn about the needs and challenges of their brains when they are very young.

Undoubtedly, what Hodgins, the NHL team’s mental performance coach, brings to the table for the youngest Canucks is maybe not that familiar to the average fan, but it still stands out to hear coaches and players gush about the impact he has had in his work with them.

And that was very much front and centre as the 2026 edition of the summer development camp wrapped up last week at the Abbotsford Centre, home of the Canucks’ AHL affiliate. Like the rest of the Canucks’ medical department, Hodgins is hardly ever made available to the media, but there is little doubt his work does a lot of talking anyway.

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“He’s great,” Canucks goalie Alexei Medvedev said. Drafted in 2025, he by his own admission had an up and down year in the OHL with the London Knights. Even the handful of things about mindset he picked up from Hodgins last summer helped him power through this challenging season, he said.

“I feel like you always want to learn, kind of develop that skill of mental toughness and stuff like that,” the goalie said. “I feel like I really experienced that last year. I feel like that is something I’ve always been missing, and obviously I have put a lot of effort into that this off-season.”

His task, he has said, is to cast aside the doubts and be the OHL’s best goalie next season. Hodgins’ guidance, no doubt will be part of that. And then there is his dream of becoming a star goalie for the Canucks. Hodgins’ mental training will help too, he believes.

“Pressure, you know it always comes from within, and you can control that, just how you handle it,” he added.

Development coach Mike Komisarek, who helped run this year’s camp again, raved about the impact he has seen Hodgins make with the organization’s young hopefuls.

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Hodgins would highlight for the players the importance of maintaining long-term consistency, as opposed to making regular short bursts of intensity, in their preparation.

Komisarek noted that Hodgins would highlight events from history, such as the chase for the South Pole between Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and a British expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott. The famed race to the pole from a century ago saw Amundsen make it to the pole and back safely, while Scott and his party perished on the return leg. They had fallen a month behind due to a variety of factors, but chiefly, Hodgins told the young hopefuls, they had been inconsistent in their efforts and their preparation.

They also talked about discomfort — that rather than shying away, you step right into the difficult tasks.

“Hodgy had another good point — how animals have a sixth sense of going into the storm,” Komisarek said. “They sense the storm’s coming — a cow will go away from the storm, which will lead to a longer duration in the storm, where buffalo will charge toward the storm, and not only lean in, but go through the storm, which ends up being quicker.”

“We’ve tried to create an environment where these guys are comfortable to make mistakes, to fall down to show some vulnerability and get uncomfortable,” Komisarek said.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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