Drills for Developing ‘Lateral Touch’ with Thatcher Demko and Ian Clark

“I’m a huge advocate of doing drills that involve different length of lateral movement,” Clark explained. “Obviously there’s times where a goalie has to be explosive to cover significant lateral distance and there’s times when a very small amount of lateral distance will help a goalie occupy the necessary space without downstream problems because you’ve over-pushed and have lateral overflow. I’m a big teacher of what I call lateral touch. You need to be powerful and explosive, but you also have to have some finesse and some touch in your game, so I have a variety of drills that involve short, medium and long moves.”

InGoal was on hand to capture one of those drills recently with Canucks No. 1 Thatcher Demko, and both he and Clark walked us through some of the keys. In this instance, they were working on finding that lateral touch in butterfly recovery situations:

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