Pro Drills with Cal Petersen
- Start warm-ups with movement patterns immediately — Petersen takes shots from the top of the face-off circle while incorporating rotations and edge work from rep one.
- Incorporate reverse post integrations early: Petersen recovers into a reverse on short-side blocker shots, then flattens the reverse to warm up game-specific muscles.
- Coach Matt Millar's 'eyes and edges' philosophy prioritizes rotational footwork so goalies are tracking plays and activating their feet simultaneously.
- Low stick shots from the knees, recovering up and across to the post each time, build both lateral movement and post-integration habits in one drill.
- Pheonix Copley's Washington Capitals warm-up routine influenced the Ontario Reign's current game-day structure, showing how pro habits travel through organizations.
Cal Petersen photo Ric Tapia/Icon Sportswire
Pheonix Copley has already moved up to the Los Angeles Kings, but his impact is still being felt in the crease with their American Hockey League affiliate, the Ontario Reign.
Reign goaltending coach Matt Millar has adopted some of the game-day routines that Copley brought with him from the Washington Capitals organization and still uses several elements as part of their morning skate warm-ups with both Cal Petersen and Matthew Villalta.
InGoal Magazine was on hand for one of Petersen’s game-day warm-ups in mid-March, and while it isn’t the full routine they do at home because of the ice-time limitations that come with being the road team, there was still lots of great take aways. The in-tight work at the end, which can be found at the end, was particularly interesting, but we’ll start where they did:
Rather than start with static shooting from the middle of the ice as so many do, Petersen prefers to incorporate movement patterns right from the start of this routine:
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