DELTA — "Where does your stick end up — it's not where it should be, right?"
Ron Johnson offers advice to a pair of South Surrey preteens inside the "shooting room" he runs at Planet Ice, the four-sheet arena located near Alex Fraser Bridge. Pucks clutter the floor as a radar gun tracks the speed of vulcanized rubber the young players are slapping at a goalie painted on a tarp at one end of the facility, decorated with trophies, championship team photos, jerseys and other knickknacks the coach has collected during his five decades in hockey.
In recent years, Johnson estimates 600 athletes have passed through the doors of his Elite Hockey Shooters clinic — eight-year-old hockey newbies all the way up to high-profile NHLers, including Ryan Kesler and Joe Pavelski.
"Most of my time is spent here, but I also travel," said Johnson, known as a "Shot Doc" who has long studied the science behind the mechanics of shooting a hockey puck.
In 2013, former Canuck Kesler flew Johnson to his Detroit-area home for training sessions.
"I guess word-of-mouth is expanding, and that's how it works with those kind of guys," said Johnson, 56, a former North Deltan who now lives in Langley.
"Sometimes, the NHL guys will shoot a video of themselves at practice and send it to me. I tell them to wait on the bench, I'll analyze (the video) and I'll send them my thoughts while they're waiting there. They'll try it out (the advice) and text their thoughts back to me. That's just using technology."
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Such specialized coaching just wasn't available to Johnson as a young player growing up in Fort Nelson, where he first learned to really shoot the puck. At age 15, he began a long coaching career that has included a number of stints behind the bench of trophy-winning teams, both at the minor and junior levels.
"When I first moved to Vancouver (in the late 1970s), I was out playing hockey and a guy saw me shoot," Johnson recalled. "He said to me, 'Oh geez, could you help me with my team?' So my first coaching gig here was with a senior girls team out of North Delta. I got to meet people in the community and I just kept coaching — unfortunately, they couldn't get rid of me for years."
In 2011, Johnson was inducted into the Delta Sports Hall of Fame as a coach whose resumé includes guiding a North Delta Bantam team to a prestigious Western Canadian title in 1999. Today, Johnson coaches the Port Moody Panthers of the Pacific Junior Hockey League in time away from his EHS clinic.
"The pros, they like it because it's just a little hole in the wall and nobody knows it's there, really," said Johnson. "They just come in the front door and people don't recognize them. But Kesler, it was pretty funny because he came in here in the summer and kids grabbed him for autographs."
With Kesler's backing, Johnson has opened a similar clinic in Anaheim, with another planned for Reston, Virginia.
"I don't sugar-coat things, I tell them what's wrong," Johnson said of his teachings, shown on YouTube as part of a series on the xHockeyProducts channel.
"It's all a lot of fun," he added. "Anytime you can help a guy score a goal, it's just a real treat. Seeing it happen on TV and watching the pros use some of the things we've worked on, it's pretty satisfying."