The Benefits of Joining All Day Summer Camp #2 - Improving Puck Skills
Our series of benefits for joining All Day Summer Camp continues with benefit #2, improving your puck skills. By puck skills, we mean shooting, passing and puckhandling. Every hockey player has to know how to shoot if they want to score, how to pass in order to get the puck to their teammates so they can score and how to handle the puck in order to get around opposing players so they can pass and/or shoot the puck.
At Fusion Training Summer Camps, we work on puck skills every day. We will either do some shooting in the dome and/or puckhandling somewhere in the arena. We stress the right form and technique in all of the puck skills so the campers will be able to shoot quickly with accuracy and power, make a good, hard pass that hits the tape every time and be able to handle the puck so they can create time and space to pass or shoot.
During our summer camps, players will get a lot of time handling the puck the right way on and off the ice, making sure they always have their head up and use their peripheral vision to see the puck while looking forward. Importance will be placed on protecting and controlling the puck. A lot of players nowadays over handle the puck or stop skating while stickhandling. We will focus on controlling the puck while moving their feet.
Passing is worked on at all levels. We will work on catching the puck with their heads up and giving the pass, while moving their feet, to the proper area. A lot of the games we play will get the players to think about how to move the puck to create space for them or their teammates and stress the importance of team puck possession.
When we work on shooting, we stress working on every type of shot (the wrist shot, the snapshot, the backhand and the slapshot) during off-ice training. A lot of kids are stuck on one type of shot, usually the snapshot or the ever popular slapshot, because they want to shoot really hard or they think the slapshot is cool, but those shots aren’t the most accurate way to shoot the puck. The wrist shot is the most accurate shot and should be emphasized more than the other shots.
Alex Ovechkin, the top goal-scorer in the NHL for the last 4 seasons, scores most of his goals with his wrist shot. This is how Alex Ovechkin scored his 50 goals last season:
We will track how many pucks the campers shoot per day for each type of shot and send out a weekly report on what they’ve done and what they should work on.
Puck Skills are a huge part of the game of hockey. As your player improves their puck skills, the more often they will have the puck on their stick. That will mean more time on the ice and more fun playing the game.
Thanks for reading. See the other benefits of joining All Day Summer Camp on our Fusion Training Blog page. Benefit #3 is Becoming More Athletic.
