Bidding an unfond farewell to the fitness test

Goodbye — and good riddance.

A new collective bargaining agreement means a long-standing pre-season ritual — timed sprint skates, measured jumps, weight-lifting contests and lung-capacity tests — is about to become a thing of the past. This September marks the final round of fitness testing, a development that Winnipeg Jets centre Mark Scheifele nearly commemorated with a T-shirt on Wednesday.

So why was this such a sore spot for players?

“I think it stems from last year and a lot of injuries coming in the pre-season, a lot of marquee guys around the league,” said Jets winger Kyle Connor.

“Guys come in now and have put in a lot of work in the off-season. So I think whether there’s testing or not, it’s not going to change guys’ motivation coming in to try and be the best player that they can be. Nowadays it’s pretty much 24/7, 365 to be a pro athlete. So I don’t think there’s really going to be much of a huge difference. The only thing I’d really say is, in our minds, it takes away completely the chance of getting an injury in one of those situations.”

There was a time when training camp was when hockey players got back into shape. Jets general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff, a first-round pick by the New York Islanders in 1988, can attest to that.

“I remember my training camps when I was with the Islanders and you walked into the dressing room and said, ‘Wow, these guys are serious, they have an (exercise) bike,’” he recalled Thursday.

Those were the not-so-good old days, when gruelling skates were routine and garbage cans doubled as vomit buckets. The modern game is faster, more skilled, and far more demanding.

“Things evolve. The players understand their bodies so much and are so invested into it,” said Cheveldayoff.

That shift made fitness testing feel like an unnecessary evil, and players pushed to have it eliminated during bargaining with the league earlier this year.

“It can kind of go both ways. I think as a young guy you prided yourself on coming to camp in good shape and showing it in those aspects. Now that I’m older, I’m very, very excited that it’s not a part of it anymore,” said Scheifele.

“Nowadays it’s so much about training, it’s so much about being on the ice in the summer and coming into camp being kind of at your peak. So I can’t see guys now just slacking all summer, because there’s no fitness testing. But I always say, once you get on the ice for the first practice you can kind of see who’s struggling a little bit or who’s not.”

The NHL didn’t fight the change, though Cheveldayoff still sees some value in the old approach.

“The benefits of fitness testing can be having base levels when guys are coming back from injuries,” he said. “As an organization, you want to put the players in the best situation to succeed in coming back off injuries and stuff like that. The medical staff, the training staff, those are things that we’re going to have to evolve with.”

Veteran defenceman Dylan DeMelo, entering his 13th full pro season, believes peer pressure, self-policing and overall performance will keep standards high and weed out any slackers who feel they can put their “feet up a little bit.”

“Will guys still do those extra skates (in the summer) knowing that you don’t have to test now? Sometimes you train essentially for the test,” he said. “It will be interesting to see how guys attack that. I think if you have a diligent group that’s training hard no matter, even if there’s no testing, maybe that team can get a bit of a head start.”

He’s seen countless examples over the years where players, not wanting to be embarrassed, have suffered an injury as they push themselves during on and off-ice testing. After all, there’s no hiding from your results, which are posted within the dressing room for all to see.

“I’m always trying to best myself, but there’s some guys in here that are absolute freaks of nature that I’m never going to beat in any of these tests,” he said.

“I think ultimately this is not only good for individual players and teams, but for the product. You want your best players playing every night. We’ve always done a good job here in Winnipeg. The testing was pretty fair. It wasn’t trying to kill you.”

While results aren’t made public, DeMelo said this year’s final round of testing showed the Jets, as a whole, are fitter than ever, with many players surpassing previous bests.

“We had one last shot at them so we really went hard at them this year,” joked head coach Scott Arniel.

“The one thing about the players today in this game, they’re athletes 12 months of the year. They’re not coming to camp to get into shape. So I’m hoping that continues. I sure hope that we don’t get into a situation where it does get backed off and then we see a ton of injuries early on in the season. The biggest thing about training camp, it is about getting your structure and your systems in place, your personnel, figuring out who they are, but the biggest thing, the conditioning gets you up into high gear.”

That’s especially important in a condensed Olympic year schedule, with the Jets playing nearly every other night before and after a 20-day February break. There’s no room for sluggish starts.

“We can’t try to get in shape as the season starts. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the practice time. We can’t play catchup,” said Arniel.

“I’m hoping that next year (without testing), it’s the same mentality. Just look at what we did last year coming out of the gate (15 wins in the first 16 games). We eliminated teams in the first month and a half and because of that great start, because I felt our team was in great shape.”

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.ca

X and Bluesky: @mikemcintyrewpg