Please Note: The Practice of the Week is usually designed to be utilized across multiple age levels.  With that being said, we highly encourage you to adjust the drills based on your team's age and skill levels.  These drills and practices can be modified to become more basic or more advanced.

The drills and games in this practice are designed to help your players work on quick transitions.

Focus Points

These themes for the practice come from Topher Scott's video on Winning the Transition:

Themes

1. Starts with Mentality - your team needs to have the mentality to push the pace and play fast when transitioning on offense or back on defense
2. Transition offense comes from good defense - creating turnovers creates opportunities on transition because the other team is not set-up in their defensive structure
3. Anticipation - players should be aware of when the transition is happening and what your mentality should be on both sides of the puck

Offensive Tips

1. Right up fast - as soon as a turnover happens you need to get through the neutral zone fast to attack quickly in transition and catch the defenders off guard
2. Changing sides - if you can get right up fast and get the puck to the other side of the ice it can create more time and space and causes even more confusion for the defenders
3. Anticipation and communication - identifying when a turnover happens or is about to happen will lead to quick strike attacks

Defensive Tips (transitioning to defend)

1. Get back hard through the middle - 3 hard strides to get back
2. Great sticks - lead with your stick on the ice and in lanes when getting back
3. Communication - verbal and non verbal communication is crucial to sort things out when there is chaos with an attacking transition