Coaching insights & hockey tips
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Star Drill - Video
In this week's video, we take a look at one of my favorite skating drills - The Star Drill. The Star Drill is a great, quick exercise to work on lateral mobility, stops & starts, and foot speed. It also has the benefit of being a great conditioning drill.
HockeyShare Stat Tracking - Practice Editing Improvement
With most teams being in full-swing now, we've been received a lot of great feedback on our Team Stat Tracking feature. We've also received a lot of feature requests. Today, we're excited to announce the ability to quickly remove multiple practices from your team's site.
Forward Stride - In Depth [Video]
We're back with a video this week breaking down another essential skating aspect of the game. This week's video focuses on the forward stride. Becoming an efficient skater with proper technique is essential to being the fastest skater you can become.
Ice Time Utilization in Practice
Last week I posted the M2 Hockey Beginner Station Training Manual for free download. One of the primary concepts behind running stations is to ensure you have a large number of kids moving, as opposed to standing around in line.
HockeyShare Stat Tracking + Google Calendar
If you're one of the hundreds of people who uses HockeyShare to track your team stats, and also happen to be one of the millions of Google Calendar users, you'll be excited to hear about our new feature allowing you to subscribe to your team's schedule directly in Google Calendar.
M2 Hockey - Beginner Station Training Manual
HockeyShare & M2 Hockey are excited to offer you the free download of M2 Hockey's Beginner Station Manual. The manual is aimed at running effective practices for beginning level skaters. The entire program utilizes stations to maximize the involvement of each player on the ice. It is designed to be a 10-week program, and comes complete with drill diagrams and explanations.
Crossovers - In Depth [Video]
The hockey crossover is an essential part of any hockey player's skating arsenal. In this video, we break down the crossover into easy teaching points and give ideas on how to coach your players into using better technique.
Creative Ways to Divide the Ice
There's no doubt, one of the easiest ways to keep our game affordable is to increase the number of skaters on the ice at any given time. The major governing bodies are pushing to get more kids on the ice simultaneously to make the most out of costly ice time. Below I've included some different ways of splitting up the ice I have found to be effective over the years. In my opinion, the key to deciding how to split your ice depends on the goals of your practice session and how many skaters you have on the ice.
Greater Good: Wadena Hockey Club
We all work hard to keep kids involved in the great game of hockey. Unfortunately for the approximately 4,000 people in the small Minnesota town of Wadena, this task was made much more difficult when a tornado ripped through their rink in June
Goalie Mask - Slow Motion
Here's a really cool video that came through in a recent inGoal Magazine newsletter. It shows a puck hitting a goalie helmet at 160mph in slow-motion. Very interesting to see the disbursement of the energy on impact.
Connecting & Communicating with Players
In order for a coach to be effective, he/she must be able to communicate effectively with his/her players. Coaches need to know who they're coaching - not just names and faces, but also personalities, goals, and desires. When a coach begins to understand the "why's" of his/her players, then the lines of clear and effective communication can begin.
Qualities Coaches & Scouts Look For
A recent article from Minnesota Hockey outlines some of the key qualities scouts and coaches look for when they're evaluating hockey players.