I've been planning on writing about (and uploading video of) some of the drills we'd been doing in our Freeze practices, but I hadn't gotten around to it... until Flickr announced that it would be supporting video. I found out a little early, which meant that I could upload to my heart's content, but I couldn't share. Now that the word is out, I'll be posting some of the clips I uploaded and talking a bit about the drills. I also have to write about how the season ended—and boy, is THAT interesting!—so stay tuned.

Here's a brief clip of the St. Louis drill, which we ran for several weeks in a row. It involves two lines starting on opposite sides of the ice at each blue line. When Billy blows the whistle, the first skater in each line takes off, skating around the neutral zone faceoff dot, down the far blue line, and up the opposite-side boards. As she does this, the second skater in each line makes a pass off the boards and then takes off after the first skater (who at this point has just passed her and picked up the puck), and they go into the zone together (although slightly staggered). The first skater is then supposed to come to a hard stop along the boards and pass to the second skater, who shoots.

Once we've done this a few times, Billy adds defensemen, who try to break up the inside-the-offensive-zone pass. At this point the first skater can either hard stop or not (we discovered that if we did, the D just came right at us and broke up the pass every time, because they knew what we were up to—and the whole point of stopping is to shake *off* the D), whatever she thinks will be most effective in confusing the D. If I can find a clip of the drill with D, I'll add it to this post later—though I doubt I have one. Once we add D the forwards are skating almost continuously, and there's no time for videoing!

Posted by Lori at 09:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Link to this Entry

We played our last game of the regular season against the Black Widows of Harrisburg at home on Saturday. Sadly we lost 4-3, which puts us in 4th place and the Widows in 1st... which means we'll be playing them again next Saturday as well. Honestly, I think we can take them. We just need to (a) not leave anyone alone on the back door, and (b) not hand them breakaways. We already did a good job of not responding to the whining, I thought.

Directly after our game, the Indy team played *their* last game of the season. They were a bit short, so a few of our players helped out. I didn't because I'd arranged for Al to drop the Beaner off after my game was finished; we were planning a Freeze-wide cookout after both games were over, and since it was a large time commitment for me, I wanted to make sure I shouldered my share of the childcare.

The Beaner actually watched the game with me fairly actively. I've learned that the secrets to keeping him interested for three whole periods are (1) bring at least two drinks (vanilla and chocolate soy milk this time) and lots of different snacks (dried apricots, pretzels, fruit gummis, tangelos, baby carrots); (2) bring the camera and shoot video (he likes to sing and/or commentate); (3) cover his ears when the end-of-period buzzer goes off; and (4) tell him which players are which, and then cheer actively. He'll join in.

Speaking of video, I got a couple fun clips, including this one:

...which ended with this:

There are more photos from the game in the Philadelphia Freeze Pool on Flickr, and I'll be uploading videos to Vimeo over the next couple days. (One of Molly on O and Katrin on D is already posted.)

Posted by Lori at 02:27 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Link to this Entry

So I mentioned in the last post that I couldn't remember on my goal whether the goalie made a save and I got the rebound, whether the puck hit a defenseman, or what. Well, I asked in the locker room last night at practice, and it turns out that it was a one-timer. Which makes total sense, now that I think of it, because Meghan and I have been practicing this very shot at the beginning of practice for a couple weeks now. Meghan doesn't seem to mind passing me puck after puck from the corner or the hashmarks at the boards, so I just keep stopping and flipping or one-timing until my back hurts or Billy blows the whistle for us to start skating. In my mind, that means Meghan deserves an assist on that goal, even though she wasn't on the ice at the time. :-)

We also talked about Tiff's goal; like me, she couldn't remember how it happened, exactly, but the rest of us remembered it being a one-timer. What's funny is that she clearly remembered my goal being a one-timer, but couldn't remember how her own went down, while I clearly remembered her goal being a one-timer, but couldn't remember how *my* own went down. Guess we've cleared that up now.

I got a bit more video of the drills last night for an upcoming post, but other than that (and the warm-up one-timer practice with Meghan), it wasn't that great a practice for me. I'm getting over bronchitis, and I spent the entire practice coughing, soaking through the two Kleenex tissues I'd brought to the bench almost immediately, sniffling, and coughing some more. Consequently, I didn't get as good a workout as I'm used to. Hopefully I'll still be able to play effectively in our game against Queenston on Saturday...

Posted by Lori at 05:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Link to this Entry