The long hockey season brings its challenges and every team at some point faces adversity. One of the toughest challenges on the ice for a team is when finding the back of the net seems impossible, and it's often coupled with a low shot count.
For youth players, this can happen for a number of factors. As the season moves along, players start to build stats, or find they have a lack of them. Parents add new forms of pressure to score more, and selfishness creeps in pretty quickly.
I’ve seen more than one team go from a brilliant passing team to a selfish turnover machine because one player holds the puck until someone steals it.
As I normally do when I am faced with a challenge and need some fresh ideas, I head here, to The Coaches Site, and review drills and presentations. However, sometimes things don’t fit just right, and I need to get creative, and that's how I created my latest drill to encourage puck movement from low to high, but in tight areas, and encourage better puck movement and smarter shots.
But first, let’s explore how we got here.
First, I started with an older drill I use, called High - Low, which is essentially two 1-on-1 battles, but this serves its own purpose, but not the one I am looking to solve now.
Drills created with Hockey Coach Vision.
But this drill reminded me of a wonderful presentation by Brian Slugacki at the 2023 Global Skills Showcase. In his Exchange Game, we worked a lot on the transition from low to high, but this drill used up half the ice, and since my team only gets a half ice slot, I needed to find a way to bring this to a small area, station based practice.
By moving to a station based drill, I accomplish a few goals. First, I can keep fewer players from standing around. Generally I try to make stations of no more than five players, so if I can cut the drill down to 4 players in motion, and 1 at rest, I would be making sure players have much more time in the drill.
Second, I am further confining the battle space, ensuring they are playing with a lot more body contact and forced to make even faster decisions.
4 on 2 Exchange - Station
In this station, 2 forwards are placed in the lower end of the ice (marked by a tire or a marker) and 2 placed higher. Then one defender is placed high and low.
The coach in the drill acts as the blueline that the defense is trying to get the puck behind.
In the drill, defenders cannot swap high or low positions (you can adjust to allow this if you believe your team needs it). Forwards, however, are allowed to do a 1 for 1 switch if the player with the puck wants to come low, the player closest to them must come high to cover their position. Failure to swap, resulting in 3 forwards low, or 3 forwards high, brings a whistle and an end to that attempt.
Forwards must also make a pass low to high before taking a shot on net. This makes puck movement critical to the drill. Once that pass is made, the game is on and they can shoot whenever they feel the time is right.
Making players react in the right space, but also putting in the low to high element, helps them find new and creative ways to work together.
I have also found that it encourages our players up high, who are often our defenders at the point, to come down and play a little lower and more aggressive, a style of play I really like from our defenders. Doing this through habit forming rather than strict system play works best for this age group. A concept you can explore more in my Minor Hockey Week presentations.
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