I am a firm believer that skating should be practiced at every single on ice session teams have. It’s one of the most important skills we need when playing hockey, but seems to take too much precious ice time, or gets a bit tedious and the kids seem bored. 

It doesn’t have to be this way, however, as we can get creative and not even put that much time into it if done well. You focus on some basics, give them just enough good repetitions, and then you can always make skating needs in other drills to reinforce those habits.

In these three station based skating drills, you can warm up the whole team with incredibly short lines, lots of repetitions in a short amount of time, and focus on crossovers and edges, transitions, and skating with your head up with a puck.

I typically run each station no more than 5-6 minutes before switching. If done right, they don't even have to switch stations, they just switch what they are doing at each. 

To set up each drill, you will need four cones or tires in each attacking zone and in the neutral zone, set up in a square.

Crossovers

One line on opposite ends of the ice sees both skaters going to their left (and after a round or 2, they go right), and you’re looking for big crossovers with good strides, rather than a bunch of short choppy crossovers. Have players focus on trusting their edges and getting more efficient strides as they go around the cones.

Transitions

Now, in the same setup as crossovers, as players reach the far end of the square, they need to transition backwards to and skate backwards until they reach the cones closest to where they started, transitioning back to forward skating.

Players will try and transition at the cone as this seems like a natural place to turn around, however, I would push them to do so once they are done rounding off the corner, this is more challenging for keeping their speed and balance. 

Chaos Stick Handling

This time, we bring pucks into play and no set path. The only rule is each player must circle all four cones. But to do so, they don’t know which cones each other will be going to, so they must keep their heads up and pay attention to each other along the way. 

These three drills might not seem like much, but with a team of 15 skaters, you have 2-3 skaters in each line and they move quickly, so you’re getting a lot of chances to see the skaters and make adjustments. With 3 drills, you’re taking up no more than 15 min of your ice time and getting edges, transitions, stride, and even puck touches. 

As players progress you can change these drills up by changing the skating patterns they use, or even putting a puck chaser in one so that the chaos drill has more pressure to ensure the stick handling is done with more game-like speed and intention.