Please Note: The Practice of the Week is designed to bring value across multiple age levels. You can use this to build ideas to develop your own practice.  With that being said, we highly encourage you to adjust the drills based on your team's age and skill levels. IHS should always be used as a starting point and you can add/remove constraints to fit your team.

Practice Theme: This practice focuses on developing backchecking habits and technique.  The drills and games in this practice put your players in different backchecking situations and require them to work hard to deny scoring opportunities.  The drills and games also work on transition and capitalizing on scoring opportunities while back-pressure is being applied.

Coaching Points

The elements of a good backcheck are:

1. Urgency and explosiveness of the first several strides
2. Getting inside the dots (or middle of the ice) as quickly as possible
3. Keep skating until you are on the defensive side of the puck
4. Maintain awareness of the opponents and the puck at the same time
    

Team Backchecking
For some of the older teams, we have a breakdown of the roles and responsibilities for each position in the document below

Roles & Responsibilities