"I find it’s important to emphasize aggressive, hard play, while also reminding them you won’t tolerate dirty play."
When you have a hockey team that begins to fill up with highly skilled players, you can often lose the edge of physical play, and even the pace of your team’s play.
An observation I regularly see is that players who are incredible with their hands often stop focusing on their speed and use their ability to outmaneuver their opponent rather than outskate them, or even better, both.
Those same players also seem to often lose their grit. Being a physical player doesn’t mean you have to be a dirty player, but they cannot shy away from body contact, even at non-checking levels.
I tell my players often, I don’t want them to be dirty, but I want the player they are going into a corner with to be afraid they might, and that will cause them to make a mistake.
You don’t have to break the rules to get that reputation, you just have to be consistently unafraid of contact, and be stronger on your skates so that you’re the one who stands up when that contact is made.
It’s a fine line, younger players often struggle to understand that line, but we use the three drills below to push both the pace of their play, but also, making them feel comfortable with physicality.
Drills created with Hockey Coach Vision.
1 on 1 Gap Control
In this drill, we often run it out of both sides at the same time, having players switch sides about halfway through running it.
Forwards line up on the top cone with the pucks, and defense on the bottom cone.
On the whistle, the forward takes off with the puck and goes around the tire before entering the zone. The defender is tracking them (we swap between the defender using their stick upside down to force them to only have the body as an option), finding the proper spot to engage the player and close that gap on them.
We focus on the defender ignoring the puck and focusing only on the body. Their job is to force the forward into their space and then make clean body contact to stop their movement forcing them to lose the puck, or at worse, take a bad shot to try to make a bad pass with no more options available.
It’s important to force that body contact and correct defenders who avoid it and try to give too much space to the forward, allowing them the time and space they need to make decisions.
2 on 2 Corner Advance
I’ve touched on a similar drill to this previously, but wanted to revisit with a little more emphasis on advancing the drill. In the previous version, the focus was on teaching winning puck battles in a tight area. That part of the drill remains, but this time we begin to focus on the physicality that leads to winning those battles.
You can start with a wider area with the pads and in the same practice, or over the span of a few, you can begin to tighten that area, giving them less room to make plays and force them to physically create room and move the puck.
The smaller area forces them to position their bodies and use puck protection. The player without the puck must then try to engage a battle and pin the player making their protection of the puck harder while his teammate steps in and helps retrieve it.
While this drill is great because it covers so many aspects of the game while also being very gamelike, it also forces players to get comfortable with physical play.
Pass and Move
When it comes to pace, one bad habit that comes up time and time again is players making a great pass and then acting as though their work is done.
One consistent message we bring up is when you make a pass, your work is only just beginning.
To enforce that, we use this 2 on 1 drill that forces a puck carrier to outwork a defender, making a pass, then immediately making a play to get open and get a shot on net.
We run this as a station based drill, but it can be modified to use half-ice with a smaller group.
The coach starts the drill by spotting a puck into the neutral zone and forward one chases it down with the defender on his back. The forward needs to use deception and speed and move either towards or away from the boards to create passing opportunities.
The second forward needs to read the play and decide which spot to best get open. Once there, they should vocalize to the puck carrier where they are.
The puck carrier should then make a quick pass, and then this is where the play picks up speed, the passer must then move quickly to separate from the defender and be open for an immediate pass back and then rush the net.
In some versions of this drill, or to help teach it, you can have the defender quit once the pass is made, but I prefer to have them keep going, forcing the forwards to move fast and not slow down.
One final note on teaching physicality. I find it’s important to emphasize aggressive, hard play while also reminding them you won’t tolerate dirty play. These are teammates and we let them know coaches will step in if a player goes too far and will correct it, but that we also have a zero tolerance policy for retaliation. This allows the kids to play hard and understand the coaches will control and handle anything that could cause a bigger issue.
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