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 9:39 PM | Comments (2)