Drills

[Goalieboy#1 1]

Hey, im coaching the local PeeWee teams goalies. I was just wondering if anybody had some foot work drills for them. I dont want them to be too complicated, but i want them to get something out of it. Any ideas? Thanks!

[furlanitalia 1]

On ice or off? Check out passthepuck.net. You have to sign up but it's free and has a pretty solid database.

[Law Goalie 147]

I have... a lot. I'll poke through and pick out a few of the less complex ones for you. They're all diagrammed and explained, and most are easily extensible. They're mainly culled from Korn, McKichan, Strelow and Dave Wells, but I've tried to minimize the emphasis on props and multiple skilled shooters per drill.

One question: are you talking about pure skating drills, or 'skate to the shot' drills?-- ie. are you looking to have the goalies doing these on their own, without pucks, or with a coach/shooter/some degree of supervision?

PM me your email address.

[Goalieboy#1 1]

Just simple(®) on ice foot movement drills. I know the X and Y and the 4 puck drill.. but cant think of anything else.

[Law Goalie 147]

Gotcha.

I've honestly never heard of the X and Y (unless Y is short for Y-Theory), and while I know three-puck well as a short-range game, I don't know four-puck as a skating drill, unless it's just a two-axis version of a confined-space drill.

edit: Just found a page that mentions those drills... I'll explain below why they're not ideal.

Anyway, that aside, all puckless goalie movement drills are trying, in essence, to work on two things simultaneously: basic goalie-specific skating movements and edge-work in the stance (C-cuts, T-Pushes, shuffling) and game-like movements. If your goalies are already powerful skaters for their age, and can move with precision and confidence in any direction with minimal disruption to their stances, great - 80+% of the work is done. At that point, you want to concentrate on simulating game-like situations.

The easiest way to do this is with the infamous 'Number Drill'. You grab a sharpie marker and draw a series of numbers on the ice around the net, indicating positions; one goalie (or the coach) calls out the numbers, the other goalie skates between those numbers in that order. The basic formation is numbers 1 to 5 spaced evenly around the outside of the crease. It'll end up looking something like this:

In this case, courtesy of Dave Wells (PerformanceGoaltending.com), the coach has also used a blue sharpie to illustrate the lines for the angles, and put a subset of letters (a, b, etc.) to indicate when the goalie should skate out (ie. 'challenge' using C-cuts) or back to the net (ie. 'retreat' using C-cuts).

It sounds complex, but it really isn't: it's just some numbers on the ice to indicate possible patterns of skating.

What's great about the number drill is that it's almost infinitely extensible. It can include all those 'letter drills' (X, Y, whatever), simply by locating and calling the numbers accordingly. Those kind of regular movement patterns are fine - up to a point. What the number drill does far, far better than those arbitrary 'letters' is allow the simulation of almost any game situation.

If you want to run a simulation of a modern power-play, run the numbers behind the net (ie below the goal-line), with two or three others out front representing possession on the half-boards, the top of the circles, and the high central point. If you want to simulate a backdoor play coming off the cycle, arrange most of the numbers on one side, with a couple on the back-side where scoring threats are most likely. When you're done with one variation, just scrape the marker off the ice and go again.

My only caution is not to use too many numbers. The generally-acknowledged threshold for short-term memory is seven items, so I usually try to keep my drills down to seven numbers or less.

If you want to build in some recoveries, have the coach/other goalie slap his/her stick or call 'down' for the skating goalie at any given number. You can also incorporate a shot at any point in the drill by stationing a shooter on one 'key' number, which, when called, indicates that a shot is going to come on that angle. Sometimes the difference between two numbers isn't even really a skating movement, but an adjustment in stance: for example, between when the puck is below the goal-line near the corner and when it's above the goalie-line in the corner. That's the kind of subtle positioning that often gets overlooked in a normal practise.

If your goalies aren't quite there yet in terms of the underlying skating, what you want to do is basically slightly specialised power-skating. Really drill them on their inside edges, on balance, on getting a strong push, with a moderate emphasis on maintaining the stance. Weaker goalies will generally have too movement movement in the upper body (and thus the stick) in C-cuts, difficulty with the aim of the lead foot for a T-push, and will lift up while shuffling, pulling their sticks off the ice. Frankly, as I'm sure Peter Twist or Laura Stamm could say with more authority, any goalie can benefit from power-skating. By all means, introduce the Number Drill, but keep it simple until or unless their skating is really solid.

Peewee is right on the threshold to start doing some butterfly-skating, ie. skating from the knees, powerful recoveries into skating movements, etc. The general guideline is not to get into it until puberty. Throwing in a few recoveries in a drill is probably fine: making them do the entire drill in the butterfly is probably not ideal.