There are a lot of things I need to work on as far as general skating skills before I’ll really feel ready to play, so each new accomplishment is a big milestone for me – one step closer to that first game.
On Sunday, I watched the adult learn-to-play class, the one a coach told me I could jump right into, and saw one of their drills:
Two players skate around the face-off circles twice and head up-ice. Pass in the defensive zone, pass in the neutral zone, pass in the offensive zone and shoot. They ran it both with and without a defenseman trying to break things up. I think I could handle this pretty well, except for the skating around the circles part.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I can skate in a circle. That’s not the problem. But this drill had them skating the top half of the circle forwards and the bottom half backwards. Since I can barely make noticeable sternway backwards and can’t transition at all, even in a straight line, the drill would be problematic for me.
So after sending T off to join the kids’ scrimmage, I worked on that today. My friend Eric tried to tell me how to do it last week, but I still can’t translate what he said into physical action.
I did, however, get a pretty stable transition going – skating straight, anyway. It’s not elegant, but it works for me.
It involves going into a hockey stop with less pressure on my leading foot, so it’s still scraping the ice a bit, but not too much, then bringing my trailing foot around to point backwards. I seem to be lifting the heel of my trailing foot during the turn, too. So I can then transition my weight to the trailing foot, which is now pointed backwards, and reposition the lead.
I practiced that for quite a while today, skating from the blue line, transitioning at the red and then gliding to a snowplow stop at the other blue line. Not pretty, but it worked.
One step closer…
