In our Parents Segment, presented by the Stop It Goaltending U app, we share some thoughts on minor hockey warm ups and getting your goalie and team ready for action with limited time available. Next week we will continue the discussion with input from other friends of InGoal.

Summary

David Hutchison
Last week, guys, I introduced the idea of getting a baseball glove for your young goalie. And when I did that, I mentioned I was working on a piece looking at the top annoyances of goalie parents. I put it out to the goalie parents Canada group on Facebook, and got a flood of comments, and it’s going to take me a while to work through all of them to finish that piece up. But today I thought I would specifically address a comment, a suggestion from a reader on there, Andrew. And I don’t have your permission to share your whole name, so I won’t, but you know who you are,

he suggested that we publish a good warm up for minor hockey goalies. And you know my my first reaction to that was, well, we’ve got lots of warm ups over at end goal. We’ve got shooting warm ups, skating warm ups, NHL goaltenders, lots of content. But of course, Andrew pointed out that most minor hockey teams get all of three to five minutes to warm up on the ice. And of course that makes sense, because ice is expensive. It’s in short supply. A lot of parents would have concurred, because many of the comments on Facebook were around the idea of the warm up and what’s happening out there. So I thought we have a bit of a different life, guys, at least in terms of spectating. We spend most of our times with leagues that get a good 15 minutes of solid warm up time on the ice and then a flood before the game even happens. We live in a different world, except for you guys with your beer league games. But gentlemen, today we are going to do part one. There will be some homework for all three of us before we do part two next week. But today, yeah, today, I just want to put it out to you. What are your thoughts if you guys were a coach, what would you suggest that your team do for a warm up to get your players and your goalies ready? You’ve got three to five minutes of ice time before the whistle goes. Darren Millard, you can start. You’re back in Brandon Manitoba coaching the U 13 week kings. What are you going to do?

Daren Millard
So you get five minutes, there’s not a lot of time. So I’m doing two drills. I would get my goaltender, the starting goaltender, on the far side, the glass side, not the bench side, uh, against the boards between the blue line and the red line, and just work on his hands and and squeezing pucks in the belly. Just one shooter there, and everybody else can twirl around and shoot. They’re not wasting that net time throughout the simple stuff. Yeah, yeah. The Guys, guys are getting their their cross bars and the off the glass and all that kind of stuff. And then I’m doing one drill of three lines, right, center and left, and players just skating into shots, and the goalie has to stop that shot, read the flow, get a feel for that. And then deep, push over, or shuffle over to the middle, and then the left, and then go all the way across. So there’s, there’s some, some foot movement in, and both goaltenders would take part in that, and that, there’s your there’s your five minutes goes fast. All right.

David Hutchison
Thank you. Really appreciate that. I like the idea of the side. I hadn’t actually thought of that. One makes better, better use of your ice,

Daren Millard
but you got to pick the side where there’s the glass, because,

David Hutchison
yeah, you know, shooting it into the bench, yeah,

Daren Millard
tipped up and hits your assistant coach,

David Hutchison
yeah, for sure. And you probably get a little bit of footwork down there too, right? Yeah. Okay, Woody, what do you think?

Kevin Woodley
first, first off, I love Darren using the sideboards, because we’ve seen that a lot. I think people think that NHL goalies have perfect situations where they’re always in the net. We’ve seen a lot of NHL goalies and goalie coaches using the sideboards, and published part of their morning skate, and published a lot of sort of that work as well. I’m going to cheat. I’m going to go with what I watched the Edmonton Oilers do this week, which is, instead of starting with the static shooting, you know, just sitting on your knees and upright, taking shots from the middle of the ice, which a lot of teams start their warm up with, they were in a bit of a tighter schedule, they wanted to incorporate everyone into the flow drills of a morning skate faster so they only had a few minutes. And so they start with a series of shooters in different places on the ice, and the goalies move around into different shots. And we’ll actually publish this. I’ve got some thoughts on it from both Stuart Skinner and Dustin Schwartz, the goalie coach, and we should be able to get this up, you know, somewhat quick. I’m working on it today.

Daren Millard
Um, can you say that a whole again? We’re just trying to get a picture in my mind.

Kevin Woodley
Well, basically, it’s basically shooting drills, but they’re moving into each shot. It’s just like combining crease movement patterns with shooting, and you’ve got shooters, and so there’s just a and there’s a series of different movements. They have more time, they’ll add some post work, little bumps into the post and then out into the shots. It all depends on how much time, but it gets the goalies moving, and it gets the goalies eyes and hands, and it gets a small group of shooters a chance to let the puck go and make passes and shoot, and the rest to your point. Darren, I do think if you want everyone, and you got 20 kids and whatever, they can’t all be involved in the goalie station. You’ve still got another side of the ice where those guys can be doing something a little more active, and then they get into their morning skate. But it gives everybody an opportunity, like I said, not wasting any time with static shooting. Everybody’s sort of moving. It’s not super crazy dynamic. It’s not fancy. It’s simple crease movement patterns into shots, but essentially the game is largely just movement into shots. Movement, shot, movement shot, just a series of those, and it’s a little more dynamic than what we’ve seen elsewhere in the NHL. The goalies like it. They feel like they’re not wasting any time. They’re getting into the things that matter to them. And the shooters that are part of the drill seem engaged enough and the guy the rest that want a little more dynamic activity for their shooting and their skating are at the other end of the rink.

David Hutchison
Love it, love that we could have an article up that will help answer this question and bring a pro perspective for the parents and that Darren also referenced something that we’d published before as well, in terms of working along the board. So that’s going to be good. I’m going to add in a few of my thoughts. I’ve had a little bit more time to think about this, although I did put the question out to you guys at roughly the same time as I started thinking about it.

Daren Millard
Okay, I’m disappointed in that, because I thought it sounded like Woody, and I came up with some pretty good ideas. And why? No, you just ruined it.

Kevin Woodley
Might as well have been on the fly because I was, I think I was covering an NHL game when the when this was posited to us less than 12 hours ago,

David Hutchison
yeah, but you had an hour drive home to think about it, even though you’re half asleep. Here’s the thing. I said, you’ve got three to five minutes of ice. But I would like to expand that, because this is for goalie parents and what they can do. And the fact is, no, I’m not. I’m just expanding the question a little bit here. Your warm up begins before you go on the ice. And I think that’s something that we need to acknowledge, guys, that’s the place to start. And we do have some dynamic warm up articles over at ingoalmag.com that people can look at if you don’t know what to do off the ice. A lot of teams have an off ice warm up, but your kid might be of the age where that’s not very structured within your team, and I would encourage you to to help them work on some things off the ice before they go. I would fit in a visual warm up off the ice. And I think if we haven’t published one with Josh Tucker, we really should a way of warming up your eyes before you go on the ice. Super important something you can do. I would suggest that some of the stuff that you do with the basic tracking and hands that you wanted to start on the ice, Darren, we don’t all get the luxury of that much time to do it, so maybe there’s a way we can do some of that off the ice. Like the thing is, goalies often, especially in minor hockey, come in cold halfway through a game, and they haven’t had any of those easy shots to warm up, and maybe we don’t need to make that part of our habit. Maybe we could find a way around that. It’s also one of the values of goalie splitting games when they’re younger, because they learn that ability to come into a game partway through without having those basic hand and gut warm ups and and the fact is that having routines as a young goaltender sometimes makes it harder on you, because you don’t always get to fit into that routine, as we’ve talked about with NHL guys who have big, long routines. We’ve all been to tournaments where suddenly that warm up gets cut short because something with scheduling has changed things. So don’t have your kid too reliant on that,

Of course, gentlemen, NHL Sense Arena fixes this too, because you can get those basic hand warm ups done before you even go on the ice. You can have as much ice time as you want. You can have NHL level ice time if your coach gives you the luxury of having a bit of time before you go out there to work on NHL Sense Arena. If you want something a little bit more affordable, there’s some deliberate ball drills that you can do. Again, I mentioned Josh Tucker. He’s got some great stuff working with reaction balls, because too many goalie warm ups, you know, they’re just knocking the ball off the wall, but it’s just kind of a mindless pattern that doesn’t really impact them too much, other than just routine. So reaction balls are a good way to warm up off the ice before you get out there after that, here’s what I’m going to say. I love that you guys came up with some specific situations. I love that you came up with some specific drills. But I would like to reinforce to parents, it’s actually okay for the players to try and score. I mean, that’s what’s happening in the game. Too many parents get tied up in Why aren’t you shooting it in my kids pads? Why aren’t you shooting into his hands so he can learn to feel the puck? The players need to try and score, because that’s what happens during a game, and that’s okay.

Homework: InGoal Magazine. Of course, is about pros, and we’ve already mentioned a couple of the pro things that we can bring to this question, but we do need some professional opinions on this. So your homework, gentlemen, get out your Rolodex, get out your contacts on your iPhone, or just stop by somebody at the rink this week, and I need you each to get one opinion from somebody in the pro game of what they would do with three to five minutes of ice time to warm up.

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