With increasingly concrete beliefs about what skills to emphasize, and a deep base of nutrition and training knowledge, Chayka established the National Hockey Institute while he was still an active player. The idea, supported by his dad and Andy O’Brien — before the latter became one of hockey’s highest-profile trainers — was to create a one-stop shop for young players looking to push past vague instructions like “get bigger and stronger.”
“You hear a lot about ‘work ethic’ or ‘compete,’” Chayka says. “I always thought it’d be great if you could actually dig into this and try to understand, in objective terms, what it means and if it’s even important. There were some people who I felt were valuing things that were irrelevant, and some who weren’t valuing things that were actually really important.”
