First we Skate

Sunday night was our first session for the spring hockey clinic. Some players from this year’s team turned out, and some new players who will be moving up in our association, and from other teams. It looks like a good group of players. It’s going to be an opportunity to work on some new skills as well as strengthen others. Hopefully the Oilers will be doing something similar to make my buddy in Edmonton happy next year. Now he tells me he’s rooting for the Sabres! (Temporarily) He’s as bad as I am with the Rangers. We all can’t always have what we want all the time. It is true that focusing on skills during the springtime does help some players on an individual basis. Because the attention is more focused on the individual than on a team, the ice time can be devoted more to improving and building the players basic hockey skills. I always go back to skating as the most critical of all skills. The stick handling and shooting are very important, but if you can’t move on the ice, you won’t get in the game. You have to get to where the puck is, or where the puck will be, and you have to get to the net. You can move the puck with a pass or a shot, but once the puck leaves your stick it’s gone unless it bounces back to you or a teammate passes the puck to you. Most of the time you have to keep moving. To do this well, you have to skate well – in all directions. Skating at public skating is great, but you also have to skate with your equipment on. It isn’t exactly the same. You will find that you skate differently with your gear on as opposed to just skating around during public skating. First thing you’ll notice is that your balance feels different. You need to bend your knees more when you play hockey to get a better center of gravity and more power. Having your hockey stick with you makes a difference too when you take any turns or transition from forward to backward skating. You need to make good strides, and you need to get as much out of each push as you can. Crossovers aka cross-unders are extremely important to work on for changing direction and getting speed and power in both forward and backward skating. If you’re skating you need to stop – both sides and front and back stops. You don’t want to just make big turns when you could stop quickly and be right where you want to be – hopefully with the puck or at the puck. The skating comes first, and you always work on improving it. Step by step with hard work and patience the skating skills improve. Most players I know are always working on their skating as much if not more that their puck skills. Usually they are working on them together-Skating with the puck, and shooting. Sometimes players develop bad habits, usually because they favor one side or avoid doing something they don’t feel comfortable doing. This is a good chance to correct these bad habits.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to work equally hard on all the basic skills, it just means that in my book skating is the first thing we work on…..and we never stop.