Confining the area in which players can work shrinks the game down to a more realistic size.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in the offensive zone or the defensive zone, if the puck isn’t in your possession, you’re battling for it.
Many drills have battle elements to them, but I wanted to ensure our practices regularly incorporated drills that focused on the actual battle, helping the players feel more comfortable in winning them, meaning we have more puck possession.
Drills created with Hockey Coach Vision.
3 to 1 Battle
In this drill, the coach dumps a puck into the corner and all three players go to battle for it, whoever comes out with the puck and makes a successful pass to the point becomes the forward, and other two players become defense. Until the pass is made to the point, all three players should continue fighting for possession.
The forward will want to either get open for a pass or get in front of the net to screen the goalie, while the two players at the point make a quick decision how to get the puck towards the net or to their teammate.
When the puck is covered, cleared, or in the net, the two players who lost the battle should move up to the point, the forward joins the other two players back in line to go again.
The battle element to this drill becomes difficult because you have no support, so the player gaining the puck along the boards only has two players trying to steal it, but neither are helping each other. This creates an illusionary 2-on-1, but a much harder scenario than they will normally face in a game like situation. Meaning, once they enter into a battle similar in a game, they are much more ready to fight off opposition as they either hold the puck until support arrives or push themselves out of the battle with the puck.
2 on 2 Corner
Confining the area in which players can work shrinks the game down to a more realistic size. The game is played within a matter of feet, not always across the full length of the ice and puck battles happen in an even smaller area.
Using pads to shrink the battle zone, two players from each team enter the area as the coach dumps in a puck and begin to battle, the second player helping dig the puck out or by offering support for the pass if possession can be managed.
Once possession is secure, the player with the puck should try to leave the battle space and get to the front of the net to score. Their teammate offers support, as shown above taking the pass to an easy goal, while the other two battle to regain possession and stop the drill.
This can be modified to a smaller area offering a 1-on-1 experience, or even leaving the 2-on-2 and forcing them to learn to work with less room.
Coach Quarterback
This drill can be run with one or two coaches, but our favourite version uses two, so that’s what is depicted in the video above.
With one coach at the top of the play and another along the boards, two players from each team go into the zone to battle for possession. To become offence, the team with the puck must make a pass to one of the two coaches. That coach will then look to make a pass back to the same team. If possession is lost, the players must regain control and then move it back to the coach to activate themselves on offence.
Variations can have the coaches moving around more so that players are also forced to pick their head up more and find the open coach to pass to. You can also add more players to tighten the space. Usually, a 3-on-3 is the maximum in this small of an area.
All three of the drills use up a small section of the ice so that you can successfully run a station based practice. We don’t often run two battle stations at the same time, but rather focus on a defensive drill in one, battle in another, and then use centre ice as a skating or skills station.
By running our practices in this way, we are maximizing our ice time and saving full ice or half-ice drills for the end of practice, or special practices in which we know we won’t be using stations.
Helping eliminate lines and increasing repetition means each player is spending more time working on their skills rather than waiting their turn.
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