Ice Geography

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Ice Geography is defined as the common spacing or markings that are on the ice and where they are from a strategic point of view. You have your regular markings, such as the blueline, redline, crease, circles, the space between the blueline and redline, the dot line (4 dots that go down the side of the ice on both sides).

Then you have the other strategic ice geography that you can’t see or not often talked about, such as the house, the slot area (low-mid-high slot), offensive seem (area of the middle of the ice), high elbow (inside the blue line on the boards), and "the point."  

For squirts we will keep this simple. We will talk about the blue-line, redline, slot, the point area of the ice, the dot line, and the house. 

DZ: 

  1. The house is the most important thing to protect, once the other team establishes their offensive structure. 
  2. If you are a RW or LW be in your quadrant if we are in our established DZ structure, so the D is in place and C is in their correct place. 
  3. After we lose possession of the puck, we are on defense and once the other team takes that puck towards our DZ, we should all be skating through the dot lane with our sticks on the ice. 

OZ:

  1. The slot is the area above the crease. There is a high slot-the top portion of the slot, mid-slot, and low slot-closest to the crease). 
  2. "The point" is the area just inside the blueline, where our D would be positioned. For squirts, I would prefer our D to play a few feet above the tops of the circles and to be active in the offense. 
  3. The F1 cheetah, F2 alligator, and F3 eagle is our forecheck. It does not matter what position they play. The cheetah is always the one closest to the puck, the alligator is supporting and would be the second closest to the puck, and the eagle is in that high slot area waiting to see how the play develops. These can be interchangeable as the puck moves from side to side. 
  4. I marked an area in the OZ in yellow by the hash marks with the #1...use these hash marks as a marker to no longer make a low to high pass to the D. Once you get above those hash marks passing that puck to your D is a very risky play.