Help your team develop a more organized strategy on what kind of defense it will play with these hockey practice drills.
In the last few months, I have written about and showed drills for teams coming out of their zone on the breakout all the way through entering and attacking in the offensive zone. Yet, we all know we can’t keep the puck the whole game and we will find ourselves playing the defensive game.
While I have previously written about teaching gap control for defense, teams need a more organized strategy on what kind of defense they will play. The strategy will be more complex as the players age up, but even at the younger 10U levels, there is a good deal of strategy so that your players aren’t just scrambling around the ice.
We will start with teaching our defense how to defend a player on the rush, or those potential breakaways coming out of the offensive zone on an unfortunate turnover. Before we even begin teaching a system, they need to know how to properly defend an attacking player. Many players go for the puck and not the body, creating even more odd-man rushes because a lazy swipe at the puck takes them out of the play.
Drills created with Hockey Coach Vision.
Tracking Drill
This simple drill has players line up on the side of the net, and only going on the coach’s whistle. On the whistle, the inside player, who is a defender, passes the puck to the player on the boards who will play offense.
The offensive player will skate along the boards and then drive the net, working on their puck protection. The passing defender will skate to the cone and pick up the attacking player from the other side of the ice.
The focus of the defender should be to use their speed to catch the offensive player and meet them shoulder to shoulder and drive them out of a shooting lane and keep them on the boards. If the defender gets there earlier and decides to transition to backwards skating, they will need to ensure they manage the gap between them and forward so as to not allow the forward to gain enough speed to blow past them.
In a lot of our games, you may hear “track them” coming from the bench when someone is coming into our zone with speed and defense is caught trying to catch them, we utilize this technique to focus on the player and not the puck, and to use their angles to meet the player where they are going, not where they are.
While pictured on half-ice, this drill can also be done on full-ice for older players.
Focus on the Body
To help teach players to stop focusing on the puck and to start watching the body, we run this station-based drill in which defensemen are not allowed to carry their stick.
We reinforce first that in order to defend without a stick, you need to watch the players chest and track their movement, not the puck movement.
The offensive player starts with the puck on the outside and skates up the boards turning to the furthest cone and starting their attack. The defender skates without a stick to the nearest cone, trying to match speed with the forward and transitioning to backwards at the cone.
The goal for the defender is to either force a bad angle shot on net by not allowing the forward to get close enough, or to use their body to separate the player from the puck.
Encourage the defender to keep an arm up and be able to touch the forwards chest with it, minding the gap they are leaving and putting their body in the forwards’ path. You will notice the players will try at first to look down at the puck or even use their feet to kick at it, and in most cases the forward will capitalize on this mistake and beat the defender.
Remind the defense to look at the chest or logo of their opponent and focus on what their body is doing, allowing the goalie to watch the puck while you try and eliminate the player from any scoring opportunity.
Rainbow Drill
Lastly, we teach them what to do when all else fails and they don’t stop the attack on the net and they need to help their goalie out in close quarters.
We run this with the defenders both without and then with their sticks.
We begin by drawing or spray-painting a half-circle (rainbow) around the net. The rule is, the defender is not allowed to exit the rainbow, and the forward is not allowed to shoot from outside of it.
The forward enters the rainbow with the puck and with enough room to have gained some speed. The defender, first without a stick, must use their body to make taking a shot as challenging as possible, trying to get them away from the net and back outside the rainbow.
The defender must be mindful of their goalie as well, working to not screen them, but to also not back into them.
The defense also must watch the use of their hands when trying to force the player outside of the rainbow because they will easily draw a holding penalty.
You can also run a similar variation of this in which the coach holds the puck near the blueline and the offensive player enters the rainbow trying to get screening or deflection positioning for a shot from the coach, while the defender tries to clear the net.
We use these drills to teach our defense how to manage the player first, before being concerned about the puck. We find that if you don’t start here, players, even in the best positioning on the ice will find themselves beaten time and time again because they are looking down at the ice and losing focus on what the forward is doing.
Once we feel our players have this heads-up mentality, we move to teaching them how to set up a proper plan in the defensive zone to allow us to defend and regain possession.
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