Goalie Helmets

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Neutral Zone Trap Clarified

Neutral Zone Trap Clarified

Seems like I’m doing a lot of Q&A work these days! There have been quite a few questions on the Neutral Zone Trap I diagrammed up a few years ago. So I decided to make a quick clarification video to resolve some of these questions. Before we jump straight in, let me just state again that there are many ways of structuring systems. Sometimes these differences are adjustments to what the other team is doing, sometimes they’re just the coach’s personal preference. Either way, use this info if it makes sense for your situation. If not, don’t use it! Here are a few key points to remember:

Neutral Zone Trap
1. The trap is a CONCEPT: make it look like the board-side breakout is open, then systematically shut it down
2. There is more than one way this can be done
3. Adjustments should be made depending on how high the opposing team’s wingers are, and where the breakout is initiating from
4. Ability to angle will make or break the trap – funnel the breakout into the “kill zone”
5. Try to shut down the other team’s breakout BEFORE the red line (to eliminate the option for a dump in)
6. Generate offense with quick NZ transitions after the turnover!

Hope this helps!

Defensive Zone Concepts, Face-Offs and Drills Video

I recently watched a video by Rick Bennett head coach of Union College that describes his approach to defensive zone play. I found the DVD to be a well designed approach to the concepts needed to teach your team the proper approach to playing as a team as well as individual tactics needed to be successful. The video is about 40 minutes long and has a number of drills that you can use to work on your teams approach to playing defense.

Coach Bennett also utilizes his goalie coach to talk about what the goaltender should be doing during the play to stay involved and to communicate with his teammates. I think this is a very well spent $29.99. I suggest if you have questions about defensive zone play you should buy this DVD and learn what Coach Bennett is teaching.

On a personal note, after watching the DVD I had a few questions and I emailed Coach Bennett with those questions and within a few hours he replied with answers and an offer to speak with him directly. How often do you get the chance to interact with a DI head coach? I suggest you buy this video and give it a good look.

Here is a link to the website where you can purchase the DVD.

Defensive Zone Concepts DVD

Winning Thoughts – How to Create a Winning Culture

In sports, any little edge that you can give to your team that the other team does not have, will help your team win more games. The video below focuses on the mental side of competing which can severely impact a players performance, especially at the competitive level. Creating a winning culture, and focusing your mind is a good habit to practice in sports and in life.

If young athletes can get into the habit of positive mental habits it will help them greatly in sports, school, and life. Older athletes can also apply these same principles in sports and at work. I was very inspired by the video below and I hope you are as well. The original video was posted here on the Coaches Site

Martin Rennie – Winning Culture

Martin Rennie is the coach of the Vancouver Whitecaps FC. During his first season with the Whitecaps in 2012, he led the team to first MLS playoff birth.

All the text below was taken from the video above – full credit goes to Martin Rennie. Video embedded  from the Coaches Site.

Key Concepts and quotes from this video

• Desire to learn –A good athlete is always looking to improve and asking “what else can I learn, what can I take from someone else” they are willing to give up their time and money to always learn more. (using Tiger Woods as an example)
• Unless you think big, you are doing a disservice to yourself and to your team. The potential we have to succeed far outweighs what we believe most of the time. The potential of our athletes is far far higher than we give them credit for. You don’t want to hold back your athletes.

Creating a winning culture and Environment (Video 13:20)

• Build your culture and environment first
  • This comes before success. You can’t wait for success to build your confidence and then build your culture. Make sure you build a culture that sustains itself whether you win or lose.
• NO EXCUSES
  • Most people agree that you can’t have excuses, but a lot of people have “legitimate reasons why they can’t succeed” those are excuses! You need to find ways to overcome those problems so the team can succeed.
• Responsibility
  • If the teams loses is it the refs fault, the other players fault or your fault? Are you saying there is nothing you can do to make the team any better? Are you giving away responsibility to someone else? There is nothing you can do to help?
  • Build a culture where your players and your staff, your coaches, your equipment guys take responsibility for what they can do better. Then you’ve got a chance to win
• Respect
  • For Martin respect is building an environment where people understand, recognize and respect what other people bring to the team. No one player is the best at everything, the team needs each type of player, and each player plays a role in success.
• Competitiveness and desire
  • Everybody wants to win, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to win. Having REAL desire is when you’re willing to make sacrifice.
  • Unless you’ve got a team filled with people who want to be the absolute best your team will never be at it’s best.
• Sacrifice
  • You need to be willing to sacrifice being comfortable to be the best. Being the best is not easy, being good is easy, it’s comfortable, players need to push themselves and work hard to be the best.

Self Image (Video 20:29)

• Biggest factor to achieving success
  • Is your self image affecting your level of success? Is your self-doubt holding you back?
  • Your self image is built on what other people have told you, or on past experiences.
  • You can’t do this or that, because everyone tells you that’s the type of person you are, and that’s the type of person you become.
  • You have players who do well in practice but not in games, that’s entirely to do with how they view themselves and that view is based on what other people have told them and what you are telling them.
  • Unless we get our players to their full potential we have not done our best as a coach.
  • We can control how we view ourselves and how players view themselves
• How do we re-engineer the mental part of the game?
  • Ask your athletes “There is a lot of things you believe about yourself, you need to go away and think about what those things are, and you need to decide if they are true or not. Who told you those things? Were they right? Were they the final authority on that? Do they know everything they need to know in order to tell you that? And are those things helping you or hurting you?”
  • Until you get the players thinking that they can be outstanding they are only going to be average. They will never be their best. They need to be aware of what they are thinking and if it’s the wrong thing they need to change it to the right thing.
• Create positive affirmations.
  • What is mentally holding you back and what is the TRUTH?
  • Write out what the truth is example – “I’m a great player, I’m a goal scorer, I’m a great passer, I’m a hard worker, I’m a fast player, I win battles on the boards, etc, etc” (use what applies to you). Write them out, repeat them, record them and put it to music, listen to it on your ipod, GET IT IN YOUR HEAD so you can consciously change what is subconsciously holding you back! Once you get that right, a lot of things start to become easier.
• Visualization – If you can visualize with enough detail you can really help your performance and chances of success. You can replicate game situations to train your brain
  • Mental Rehearsal – Visualize in detail the key things you need to do in the game (whatever your role is)
  • Mental Movies – Imagine yourself on a big screen, imagine everything, the feel, the smell, the sound. When game time comes it’s already happened 100 times in your brain and you’ve got the confidence to do it again.
• Goal Setting (Video 30:27)
  • We all want things, but are they actually goals, or are they just wishes?
  • Most people would like to have success, most people would like to win. Others desperately need to do it and they are willing to do anything to make it happen
  • It’s too easy to get comfortable, it’s too easy to just be good that we don’t force ourselves to be great. It’s natural to want to be comfortable, our mind doesn’t want to work harder, but if you desperately want it and build up reasons to succeed and reasons not to fail you can make it happen.
  • You need to plan your goals in detail. You need to know everything in detail what you need to do to succeed.
  • If you plan your path to success in enough detail your chances of reaching success is much higher
  • You must have the self-image of a person who can achieve that goal. If your self-image does not believe that it’s possible for you to achieve that goal then nothing will help you succeed.

Bucket Filling (Video 36:15)

On the team you coach you have many team members and every team member has a “bucket”. Positive players who are having success on and off the ice with loads of confidence have a “full bucket”. There are also players who have low confidence, they aren’t playing that well, maybe they have some personal problems at the moment, those players have an almost empty bucket.

To get the environment you want and get the most chances of success you need to “fill those buckets”. When you do that you have a better chance of enjoying yourself and succeeding.

When you cut down players and always tell people what they can’t do or have done wrong and highlighting their faults you are emptying their bucket.

If you are pointing out the positive things, and get your other staff members to do the same, and get players to do the same you will start to see that people are good at giving encouragement and thrive on it. Get in the habit of encouraging players, saying positive things, pointing out a few things they do well and focus on their strengths.

Encourage people to be the best!

Attempt to create an environment where players do not say negative things about other players behind their backs. If there is a problem you can say it to the player or coach, but avoid speaking negatively of players in groups when the player is not there. This does nothing for the team.

Create a culture where everyone builds the other players and staff up. Instead of complaining behind the players back, mention it constructively to the player to help them succeed.

I hope you have taken away a few positive points from this article. If you enjoyed reading all of these points I encourage you to watch the video. Martin does a much better job of delivering the points and driving them home in the video. Set aside an hour to watch the video and then work on implementing the points that are made. I think they will help you become a better player and a better person.

Thanks to the Coaches Site

I have recently discovered the coaches site and have been reading a lot of the articles and watching all of the videos. I will be sharing some of the videos here on How To Hockey and breaking down the key concepts within the video (in case you don’t want to watch the entire seminar). If you are a coach or player who wants to study the game of hockey I recommend checking out the coaches site, there are detailed seminars from many professional coaches and you can learn a lot.

How to Beat a 1-2-2 Forecheck

How to Beat a 1-2-2 Forecheck

I’ve had a few questions come in recently on the 1-2-2 Forecheck. Specifically, coaches are looking for ways to beat it. The 1-2-2 is a great forecheck, but, as is the case with any system, it’s beatable. Your objective is to control the puck, drawing players out of position, then beating them with a pass. Here are the key points:

How to Beat the 1-2-2 Forecheck
1. Defenseman carries the puck to open ice
2. Defenseman walks the puck until someone comes to get him (if nobody comes, he walks all the way down the ice!)
3. As soon as F2 or F3 leaves their coverage to attack the Defenseman, he or she moves the puck to that side of the ice, hitting the now-open player with the pass
4. At this point you’ve got two players beat, and you’re walking out of the zone in an odd-man rush

Neutral Zone Regroup Drills

Every coach has their own style of play through the neutral zone along with how they want their team to work a regroup. Below are a few drills that you can use to work on your teams NZ play along with a simple document on how to run two styles of NZ regroup. Hope these drills can be helpful.

NZ Regroup Philosophy
.
Hinge Drill
Hinge with Regroup Passing
D Shot with Hinge
2 on 1 with Pressure
3 Shot Quick-Up
Post-Up 2×0
Quick Up Shooting
St Johns Shooting
Tactical Shooting

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How to Plan Your Practice Using HockeyShare’s Practice Planner

How to Plan Your Practice Using HockeyShare’s Practice Planner

A while back, I did a post showing how to use HockeyShare’s drill diagrammer to set up your drills. As I mentioned in that video, one of the things I like best about HockeyShare’s drill diagrammer is that it’s web-based, and cross platform. Which means you can access your drill library from any computer, whether it’s a Mac or a PC!

In the video above, I show you how to plan your practice using the planning mode. In my opinion, this is where HockeyShare really shines! As your planning your practice, you can check out any drill by hovering over the drill title with your cursor. To add a drill, simply click the name of the drill, and it will be added to your practice.

Now here’s the REALLY cool part:
Obviously, you’ll have access to whatever drills you’ve added to the system. But on top of that, you’ll also have access to all of the public drills, as well as all of your team & association drills! And if that weren’t enough, you also have the ability to share entire practice plans among your team or organization!

Here are some of the links mentioned in the video:

• CLICK HERE for Public Database of Hockey Drills
• CLICK HERE to set up your free account at HockeyShare
• CLICK HERE to check out the Drill Diagrammer “demo model”
• for my Public Drills

Enjoy!

Jeremy

How To Do the Datsyukian Deke

The Datsyukian deke is probably the most magnificent feat I have ever seen a hockey player perform on more than one occasion. When performed properly this move sends the goalie to the OTHER SIDE of the net, giving the player a completely empty net to score on and with Datsyuk behind the wheel he usually shelfs the puck just for extra style points. Before showing you the video on how to do the Datsyukian deke I will show you the move in all it’s glory below.

Thee Datsyukian Deke

This is the first time he pulled this beauty off, sorry not available in HD.

What Pavel Datsyuk is doing in this deke

The trick to this deke is doing everything very quickly, and at the last possible moment. This forces the goalie to react to your fake, because if he doesn’t react you could score (if of course you were not faking the shot)

1. Skate with the puck IN FRONT of your body, this tells the goalie you have to either deke left or deke right and keeps him in the center of the net
2. When you get to about the hash marks you move the puck to your shooting side. This tells the goalie you are probably going to shoot, he moves over a bit to your shooting side to line up with the puck
3. Show some blade and push the puck towards the side (whatever your shooting side is) of the net. This forces the goalie to attempt to save the potential shot
4. At the very last second roll the blade over and catch the puck with the back of your blade while simultaneously turning your front skate
5. Now with the puck on the back of the blade of your stick, and your skate turned across the crease you pull the puck back, cut across the top of the crease and watch the goalie sprawl out with no chance in H-E double hockey sticks to stop you
6. Score on empty net
7. Sounds complicated, so watch the video below

How to do the Datsyukian Deke

This video explains the Datsyukian deke, he does have quite a few moves up his sleeve so if you want to learn them all (and about 20 moves in total) check out my Goalie Buster course (link at the bottom of this article)

More examples of the Datsyukian Deke

Claude Giroux does a great rendition against the Maple Leafs

Ryan Getzlaf also pulled this move in 2006 (also not in HD)

If you’ve got some questions you can ask below or on the Pavel Datsyuk – datsyukian deke video page on Youtube or in the comments below.

Want to learn more dekes

I recently released the Goalie Buster breakaway course and have gotten a great response so far. If you become a member you will learn about 20 moves, where and when to use them, plus lots of other great tips for scoring on the goalie. Plus I’m selling it for $10 off for the Spring / Summer.

Thanks for reading, if you liked the hockey instruction you can share this article with friends using the Twitter or Facebook buttons below.

Canadian Tournaments in Ontario

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USA Clinics Roller Hockey Skills Camps