Sabby's Clinic 8-14-14

These days, Sabby's clinic is the only real chance I get week to week to get out on the ice. It's a good thing I've been able to go every week, but I hope I can go to at least one stick time or skating session soon.

My slap shot is pitiful. I think I might consider prioritizing flex on the next hockey stick I buy because 85 may be too stiff for me. I also could work on my technique because I think that could use some work. But holy wow, my slap shot is pitiful.

Today was a good session. I started off strong, doing everything right (except scoring when I took my shot) and at my highest pace in the first drill, and I took it from there. There were some minor pacing issues the later we went on, but overall, I'm getting better at making passes, targeting my passes so my teammates get it in stride, and catching passes myself.

Last week was an absolute trainwreck, but even if it was super easy to have a better week than last week, I still will mention that I had a much better session than last week. I feel like my competence in executing drills was up, and my execution during the scrimmage was up as well. I was on the ice for a goal against where I feel like I was screening my own goalie, but he didn't say anything to me. But every pass attempt kept the puck moving toward our opponent's net, and I even led the rush a time or two.

I'm still pretty clueless about how to manage the puck in the offensive half of the ice. I know when I have the puck across the red line, I'm going to make sure we're onside before carrying the puck in. But there was a particular zone entry where I could have tried to beat a guy wide and instead just dumped the puck. I don't think he was lining me up for a hit (it's a clinic scrimmage in the middle of the day for crying out loud), but I guess I was still worried about turning the puck over at the blue line and just wanted to get the puck away from our end.

I think my whole muddled disposition with trying to describe that sequence is a sign I need to slow my game down a bit. There is a point where thinking gets you into trouble because a sport like hockey moves way too fast for anybody to really do any thinking. But still, maybe I could have taken the puck and driven into the zone and pulled up to buy a second a or two to make a more intelligent play with it rather than just throw it behind the opponent's goal line. I wasn't really thinking much of anything when I dumped the puck in. I just saw a guy closing in on me near the boards, and . . . I don't know. There was once sequence where I threw a pass that ended up trickling toward the goalie because I missed my target, but at least I was trying to make a play which didn't work out. That dump in bothers me considering I'm trying to get better by learning how to make plays with the puck. It wasn't like I was even trying to get off the ice for a line change either.

There was another moment during the scrimmage where I definitely felt the effects of leg fatigue. I was on the right wing boards and our defenseman had the puck and was carrying it and looking for a way to get out. He saw me up ice, and the two of us saw the open ice in the middle (wide open) that I needed to skate to. My brain was telling me "skate to open ice!" My left leg was not cooperating. I wasn't injured, but my left quad was just so worn out from all the pushes of skating and stopping for the previous 85 minutes, it took longer than it should have for me to get into space. He fired the pass and there was still a chance I could have corralled it cleanly and gone in for a rush, but I think that split-second delay because of my leg threw the timing off. I really need to get out on the ice more than once a week. I could do certain leg exercises, but there's nothing better to exercise my hockey skating than . . . well, more hard skating.

Sabby's Clinic 8-7-14

After a run of three straight weeks scoring a goal in scrimmage, my streak ended. More than that, a lot of other things just made me think "today's not my day."

We had a guy there who, according to someone else out on the ice with us, plays in a European professional league. He certainly played like it, skating circles around so many of us. I had the honor of him getting past me by skipping the puck over my stick as he took a shot on net that my goalie thankfully bailed me out on. If there's one saving grace for me on that sequence, it's that he didn't get behind me but just created a shooting lane with his superior skill.

There were lots of problems with me during the scrimmage. My backskating definitely showed that it needs a lot of work, including transitioning from forward to backward in the same direction. One guy actually blew right past me because I didn't turn around in time, so he drove wide and was already level with me when I turned around to start backskating. Welp.

I had the puck on my stick probably six times or so. All six resulted in changes of possession. All were through different means: bad pass, outright giveaway, attempted clear, flat out getting the puck stolen from me, blocked shot attempt, and overskating.

The drills were a lot better for me for the first time in a while. I had moments of realizing my desire to be that player you can't give a bad pass to: I took a pass from skate to stick; I caught a pass with one hand on my hockey stick, full extension to catch it on the heel of my stick; I caught passes on my backhand and retained possession. It's a step in the right direction.

It's not a session to write home about. It's one of those that you say just to throw it away and act like it never happened. There are things to learn, but otherwise, I'm going to pretend like this never happened.

Goals, goals, goals

I'm currently on a three-scrimmage goal-scoring streak at Sabby's clinic. For someone who didn't grow up playing hockey, and for someone who still doesn't really think too highly of his own hockey skills, this is a big deal. It remains to be seen just how it would translate to a real hockey game, but I'll save all that for another time.

Three weeks ago, it was the first time I scored since a two-goal output one random scrimmage time when I made a cameo appearance at the clinic for my spring break. We unfortunately got scored on, and when play restarted, I took the puck up out of our zone along the boards and skated past a guy who admittedly was a bit half-hearted probably because he had to let us leave the zone after they scored against us. I skated and chipped the puck past him and continued carrying it across the opponent's blue line.

Here's where it gets a little dicey and luck-ish: one of our teammates was headed off the ice, and was going out through the door in our offensive zone. I tried to carry the puck further into their zone but lost it into said teammate's skates. The defenseman who would otherwise have corralled the puck and cleared the zone got tripped up by the deflection off his skate. I pressured the puck carrier and got it back before firing a shot from the circle just under the goalie's glove. End-to-end, score.

Two weeks ago, I completely forgot exactly how the play led up to this, but I think we skated into the zone three-on-two before the puck carrier pulled up at the half-wall and I was driving far post. The puck went back to the point at the corner of the zone when I noticed someone was on me but there was open space in the slot. I skated back and got open, got a great feed from that defenseman at the corner point and took a stride toward the net before taking a shot. Now I originally wanted to fire the puck above the pad, under the blocker of the goalie, but I fanned on the shot partially so that it ended up staying along the ice and went five-hole instead. The goalie was definitely preparing for a shot competently executed instead of a flubbed up shot-pass along the ice.

Last week was a total fluke. Total. Fluke. Off the scrimmage opening faceoff, I was on right wing and went to the boards off a won faceoff. Our defenseman fed me the puck and I controlled it (woohoo!) and skated up ice with it. I was expecting the opposing defenseman to close-in on me, which he kind of did. He did a little sweep check as I crossed the blue line, but I maintained possession. Scrimmages here are generally non-body-checking, but this guy has hip-checked a person before, so I made sure to keep my head up. He was still giving me space and wasn't trying to take the puck away, so I just took the space and drove wide. I knew I was too far in to try to cut to the net, so I instead looked for someone driving far post for a pass through the crease. I saw semblances of a teammate driving (I say "semblances" because I couldn't actually see much besides someone's leg socks because a defender was in the way), so I decided to throw the puck in front. When I did, I tried to airmail the puck so it would avoid defenders' sticks and skates. What ended up happening is my attempted saucer pass deflected off the knee of a defender's shin pad and straight to the back of the net. Goal, maybe 10 seconds in. Funnily enough, that was the goal I celebrated the loudest.

Scoring goals is fun. I know this won't happen every single time, but I'll ride this hot streak as long as I can. As much as I bemoan my own puckhandling capabilities, that may actually be my best hockey skill right now: passing needs work, reading plays needs (LOTS OF) work, decision-making needs (SO MUCH) work, even my shot needs work. I've been pretty good about not getting the puck turned over when I carry the puck through the neutral zone. Hopefully the scoring streak continues tomorrow.

Progress

This is a post I've been wanting to write for a long time. And in the time I've been waiting, I've been making more and more progress, making the delay even worse by adding more material to my mental notes (if not the actual content of this post) about how far I've come since the last time I wrote about my progress in anything hockey-skills-related.

Part of the trouble has been wondering how to write about my progress without saying the same thing all the time and turning this blog into a space that sounds more like those stock answer interviews lots of professional athletes give. There is progress I've made, but a lot of it has been incremental and probably would only be noticeable after a long time. It's been a long time since I've actually learned to do something new. There are certainly still things I can learn, but in the limited situations I've put myself in with hockey clinics, scrimmages, and sticktimes, I've been able to hold my own with what I can do. Now it's just a matter of things like skating faster and handling the puck better.

It's been a long time since I've worked on my skating. I can still do things like pivot from backwards to forwards and switch directions, but those and a lot of the more complex skills have deteriorated a bit. There's less fluidity in my backwards skating, especially my back crossovers. There's almost no more fluidity to my transitions from forwards to backwards. I also feel like my top speed has gone down a bit, but I still feel pretty swift on the ice. I need to be more conscious of my knee bend, and maybe that'll help my speed. My tight turns are still pretty putrid, but they're probably the one skating skill that's improved a bit in the time since my last post about my actual skills.

My skating is still suffering a bit as well from the skate size disparity between my right and left skates. There's a little bit of space in my left boot which has been affecting my skating ever since I started doing turns and crossovers. If my highest priority purchase in terms of hockey equipment is a new hockey stick, properly fitting skates is a very close second. There's also the possibility of baking my skates, but I'll have to look more into it to see if it'll actually conform to my left foot and close the space in the toe that gets really annoying when trying to grip the ice for turns and back crossovers.

--

There's been a huge metamorphosis in my philosophy of what kind of player I want to be. I still feel most comfortable playing as a defenseman despite my obvious shortcomings in terms of size and puck skills. When I played intramural hockey at Brown, especially in my first season, I hardly ever made good plays or decisions with the puck. I always just tried to make sure there weren't any breakaways against us (which is partially why I hardly ever skated beyond the red line because the puck was always coming back into our zone) and break up plays the other team was trying to make. I was mildly successful in that endeavor, but the whole operation broke down every time I got possession of the puck. I turned it over, and whoops, time to play more defense.

There's a slight sense of irony to this change in my attempt at growth. Anti-stats people have often decried the hockey analytics movement because of many straw-man-ish reasons, but the overall insight has proved so valuable to me. The Red Army teams of the Soviet Union and the Detroit Red Wings of the '90s (of Russian Five fame) prided themselves on puck possession, and doing dogged work to get it back when they didn't have it. Recent work into correlations of possession metrics like Corsi and Fenwick have shown that the most successful teams in the NHL have players who are the best at keeping possession of the puck. How am I going to improve my game? I have to--HAVE TO--get better at handling the puck, making plays with it, and getting it back when I don't have it.

I've made a conscious effort to get better at handling passes. The worst night of hockey for me skill-wise was my first practice session with the Brown club team. The first drill of the night: skate goal line to opposite blue line, turn, get a pass, shoot on the goalie. I could keep up with the pace of the skating, even if my lack of conditioning showed by the end of the drill (which was the first of the night, so you can imagine how the rest of the night went). My turning wasn't great, but it wasn't specifically a tight turn thing, so I could curl around the faceoff dot outside the blue line.

Get a pass? Pffft.

They started out feeding me hard passes which I predictably missed every single time. I took maybe one shot because a puck happened to be in line with where I was skating. When they saw I was struggling, they eased up a bit. Still failed. The last pass I got of the drill was literally a pity pass given at such a slow pace just to make sure I couldn't screw up handling it.

I overskated it.

It's been almost a year since that night, and since then, especially since the summer started, I've tried as best I could to get better at handling passes. Like the linked Bourne article mentions, I want to become a player that you can't give a bad pass to. Lofty for sure, and I still don't quite know how to handle passes in my skates, but I'm much better at handling passes on my forehand. Backhand needs work but is miles better than it ever has been. You give the puck to me, I want to make sure the play continues toward the opposing net.

--

I've made a conscious effort to improve my decision-making once the puck is on my stick. I used to always do one of two things: fire a hope pass which usually ended up in a turnover; or dump the puck across the next line, whether it was out of our zone or below the opponent's goal line. Part of that was me trying to "play within myself" because I really didn't have much hockey skill to speak of. The safest thing to do is the dump the puck toward the opponent's end, right? It's what NHLers with little skill do, so why shouldn't I do it too?

There are obviously several problems with that approach. The first and most egregious is that when I got the puck, I always missed out on using my best skill: my skating. The play literally died when the puck got on my stick. I didn't know what to do with it, and I was always flat-footed because, hurr durr, I apparently can't skate with a puck on my stick. The second is that constantly dumping the puck in or just firing it somewhere into space and hoping someone on my team gets it requires no on-ice intelligence and prevents me from actually developing the skills needed to get better at making plays. I suck at making passes and refusing to pass the puck competently (or at least trying to) means I won't get better at it. Even if I keep my head up (something I'm getting better at doing), just blindly dumping the puck means I'm not attempting to read a play or find an open teammate. Third is that I never develop any puck skills, so my stickhandling suffers as a result. The former approach literally stunts my hockey growth.

There's still work to do, as there always will be, but I'm proud to say I'm light-years ahead of where I was before. There are still times when just flat out clearing the zone or dumping the puck is warranted, and I'm getting better at recognizing those. My stickhandling is improving, and I can competently skate the puck without overskating it or losing it by overhandling it. In fact, I scored a goal in a clinic scrimmage a few weeks ago because I skated the puck along the boards and went end-to-end with it. (Full disclosure: There was a lot of luck involved as well.) I'm passing the puck and starting breakouts more often than ever. I still need to work on the pace of my decision-making, especially in the neutral zone, because I take too much time there and I end up losing the puck or making a dumb pass. As well, my actual passing is improving too. I've made several successful saucer passes when I could barely get the puck up off the ice before. I've made hard passes across large swaths of the ice to spring my teammates in on the rush.

The hidden externality of all this progress is that my confidence on the ice is higher than ever. There are always people better than I am on the ice, so I don't ever need a reminder of my place on the hockey-skill totem pole, but knowing I'm capable of doing some things competently is worlds ahead of where I was the last time I played in an organized league. I wish I had started earlier so I could play a third and fourth year of intramural hockey, but I'm confident (once I get other life issues sorted out) I'll be able to find a rec league I can mesh in and learn a lot from. Until then, there's plenty more to work on, and I finally feel capable of reaching certain skill plateaus and improving my actual hockey skills.

Have you had your Green Biscuit today?

Two Saturdays ago, I went to the Discount Hockey store in Woodland Hills to buy a new hockey stick. I wanted to get something at least very similar if not exactly the same as my current Warrior Mac Daddy, 85 flex, Jovanovski blade pattern. Needless to say, the fact that the Jovanovski (aka Lidstrom, aka W02) blade pattern doesn't seem to be sold widely anymore made me a disappointed customer.

I did pick up two other things: more black hockey tape (although it isn't Renfrew, and I think I like these particular rolls better than Renfrew) and the Green Biscuit. I'd seen it before and was curious enough to want to get it, but I never bothered to order it online. I saw some Green Biscuits in the display case of the checkout desk, and I thought "why not?"

As the linked video shows, the Green Biscuit works very well for what it was designed to do: stay flat on less-than-ideal surfaces. The friction of the vulcanized rubber of a hockey puck makes for nightmare-inducing and frustration-building training exercises because the puck won't stay flat as it would on ice. When you as a player are practicing stickhandling and trying to get better control of the puck, you want to increase your pacing. Doing so with a puck on surfaces other than ice or a shooting pad or varnished, smooth flooring is just going to disrupt pacing.

After practicing with this for a week in my garage (the only real space I have at the moment), it's everything that it's advertised to be, and I love practicing with it. This particular version is designed just for stickhandling and passing (they make a shooting version if you want something more durable), and it works wonders for it. There's a split in the flooring of the garage based on how the flooring was laid out, and the Green Biscuit glides over it like it's one continuous piece of flooring. I haven't used it extensively in the driveway, but it's a tiled pattern with space between the pieces, and again, the Green Biscuit slides over it all like I'm really stickhandling on ice.

If there's one thing not to like about it, I guess it's that the product works too well, if that's possible. While regular hockey pucks cause problems on rough surfaces, there is something to be said for learning how to handle bouncing or rolling pucks because those kinds of things happen in games all the time (especially depending on the ice quality). The puck stays flat to the point where you have to actively try to get it to flip up or do something other than slide on the surface. But as a training aid, it provides a seamless practice tool for stickhandling and passing.

Hockey Stick Length

I'm pretty sure I've already mentioned in this space before about how much I love my Warrior Mac Daddy hockey stick. My favorite thing about it is the Jovanovski curve and its square toe. But a couple months ago, I came across this very curious website.

I had been searching the internet for methods of cutting hockey sticks, both in what tools I needed to actually cut them so that I wouldn't need to go to a hockey shop and in where on the stick I should cut it for my height. Yes, I'm fully aware that like most aspects of hockey equipment, the best judge is me and what I feel works best for me, but having very little on-ice experience isn't a great barometer for determining what works for me, so I wanted to see what works best for other people.

At that point, I stumbled upon that Cut Hockey Sticks website, and it really piqued my interest. A lot of the photos were certainly convincing and also didn't look photoshopped. The video was also pretty interesting, but since it looked like an old video, it made me wonder: how applicable is their method of cutting hockey sticks if they're all using wood hockey sticks with what looks like very minimal curves?

I paid more attention after first seeing that website to keeping the blade of my stick down as flat as possible. Since I use sticks with curves, I obviously had to turn them a little bit, or else the blade would come up off the ice. But when I tried to let my blade lie flat while holding my arm straight down, this happened:

I highly doubt it would be good for me (or anyone else) to have to turn their hockey stick this much just to handle a puck with the blade flat on the ice. So let's do what the video did and bring my hockey stick up so that my blade is flat on the ice:

So that looks more acceptable from this angle. How much of my hockey stick will I have to cut to get it to this length?

!!!!!

Yeesh.

If I just absent-mindedly went through and chopped off (mutilated) that much of my hockey stick, I might get a stick that would conform to the video's guidelines, but the flex would be non-existent for someone as not-very-strong as I am. I might also run into other problems using a stick that short while on skates.

Still, the whole premise was something I wanted to pursue and see where it took me. I also have a CCM U+06 hockey stick which I decided would be my dummy test for short sticks. It was an 85 flex with a Couturier curve, and at its store-bought length, it was about an inch or an inch and a half shorter than my Warrior stick. I picked a point on the CCM stick and had it cut. Here are more pictures for comparison:

Warrior stick gets at or slightly above my eye level. Yes, I know that's a pretty long hockey stick for me.

And here's the CCM stick after it's been cut. Comes up just below my chin.

And just to illustrate the point further, here are two pictures of the hockey sticks side-by-side to better grasp the difference in shaft lengths:

I haven't actually taken out a ruler and measured it, but the difference between the two hockey stick shafts is about 7 or 8 inches.

It's been a few weeks now, and the early returns aren't very promising. I don't know how much is me just getting used to using my Warrior stick or whether I'm doing things "correctly" or any other number of factors.

I've used my Warrior stick for a couple weeks on the ice here in LA during my winter break, and I've pretty much eliminated the problem of the bent elbow on my own. Whenever I would take a stick and puck down to the basement of my house at college, I would get an ache in my shoulder from stickhandling because of how much I bend my elbow, but the problem seems to have gone away on its own, both in on- and off-ice stickhandling. I'm much more mindful of using my top hand when stickhandling, and that seems to have helped a bit.

The shorter CCM stick actually isn't bad. I was hesitant at first because I really wasn't used to having a hockey stick that short, but I decided to use it at Sabby's clinic one week, and use only that stick. Stickhandling was actually more comfortable with the CCM than with the Warrior. Overall, as I got used to the feeling of it, I found that I could work with it pretty easily. The downfall is that because I had to cut so much off the original, the flex is too stiff, so I can't shoot the puck at all with it. The second problem I is controlling loose pucks, especially off the boards. Surprisingly, there was no discernible difference in defensive zone coverage, and I had plenty of data to draw from because I somehow kept being the last man back on a two-on-one during the Sabby's clinic scrimmage.

It was an interesting experiment, but I'm not entirely sure where to go from here. I still have the CCM stick because it's a useful emergency backup if something ever happens to my Warrior stick. I would like to see if I can use a stick more regularly that's closer to the CCM shaft length. I can't quite say that I "prefer" it because I've found ways to work with both, and especially in recent weeks, I've gotten much more comfortable with my Warrior stick. I don't see any senior sticks sold at that shaft length, and if I cut it, every single stick I can find on the market will have too stiff a flex. I don't see any intermediate sticks either that are sold at that shaft length, and I'm worried about having a flex that's not stiff enough.

I'm not yet at the point where I'm comfortable cutting my Warrior stick even just an inch or two. With the way I'm getting used to it and working really well with it as is, and with me not wanting to risk anything with this hockey stick because it took me forever to find, I'm not willing to do anything to change it just yet. I may cut it a couple inches at some point in the future, but that will be a long time from now. 

At this point, I'll take my two goals from last week's Sabby's clinic scrimmage, scored with my Warrior stick, and just roll with it into the second half of intramural season.

Sabby's Clinic 1-16-14

After a one-week break for a trip to Providence, I went back to Sabby's Clinic at the Valley Ice Center for what will probably be the last time because of scheduling difficulty next week. Also, I probably don't want to ruin what was a good day at the rink yesterday.

Without a diagram or a Drill Draw, I'm not going to try anymore to describe the drills. Instead, I'll just say how I think my skills fared and what I might need to work on.

As usual, my biggest skating deficiency is tight turns. It gets even worse when I'm trying to carry a puck because I end up slowing down to try to keep the puck on my stick. Even just turning with the puck is a problem sometimes, especially when turning to my right, because I either lose the puck off my blade or I slow down as I make my turn and attempt to crossover. As a right shot, it's even more awkward trying to turn to my right because I can't just cup the puck on my blade the way I can if I turn left. Of course, turning left is a problem because my tight turns in that direction are infinitely worse than doing tight turns to my right.

Overall stickhandling and carrying the puck feels worlds different after a few weeks getting on the ice. I'm not longer terrified to handle the puck even though I still bobble it sometimes, and I'm 1000% better than even last month at making and receiving passes.

I definitely feel and notice that my straight-away skating speed is improving with ice time and technique changes and attention to detail. I'm getting better at knowing when and how to expend my energy on the ice, but guys who used to be faster than I am, I'm catching up to in speed. There were multiple races back into my defensive zone during the scrimmage yesterday where someone would have had a sure breakaway, but I at least managed to be a warm body between the shooter and my goaltender.

If the last time I went to Sabby's clinic was a display in how to dominate the drills and fail miserably in the scrimmage, yesterday was the polar opposite. Execution in drills wasn't terribly sharp, and there were multiple instances of fanning on the puck while attempting to take a shot. But once the scrimmage started, I felt great. I didn't wear myself out the way I did in previous weeks, I scored 2 goals, had 2 blocked shots, and didn't have any egregious turnovers.

On my first goal, the puck turned over at my blue line, and almost everyone was behind me, so I took it and had a 2-on-1 skating in on the right side. The defender had the pass covered pretty well, and I was definitely looking pass almost the entire time, but when it was clear I had to shoot, I took the shot. The puck went 7-hole and I thought the goalie saved it, but when I kept going to the side of the net, I saw the puck squeak through and barely cross the line as I went behind the net.

The second goal was on the same shift. A player on the other team was trying to carry the puck across his own blue line, but he left it behind trying to get a handle on it, and I skated it back in. An attempted pass went behind the net, and after some great work by a teammate, he got the puck to me wide open on the back door, and there's no way I would have screwed that one up.

I go back to Providence in a week. I can't wait to get back to work on a rink where I don't have to pay money for ice time. It'll also be nice to have the rink more or less to myself since there are only about 4 or 5 other people there (at most) at any given time. Even better, I can't wait for the spring section of our intramural season. It's amazing what scoring goals even in a low-key situation like a clinic scrimmage can do for your confidence.

Hockey Journal 8-25-13

I fly back to Providence on Wednesday for my senior year at Brown University. Unfortunately, I won't be able to go to any stick time or do any skating until then, but thankfully, starting with the second week of school, Meehan Auditorium will have plenty of University Skates for me to work on my skating.

The ultimate drawback to this whole setup is that my skating, while not terribly great especially in skates that aren't the best fit for me, is still my greatest asset. It would be much more productive for me to do more hockey-specific stick and puck work because I still can't make a clean pass to save my life. I've come a long way from my trial-by-fire first game where I literally played without ever having actually learned to play hockey even though I knew all the rules but practiced none of the skills except skating, and it won't be fun to have to put all the progress on hold until I can manage to find a way to get some stick and puck work in.

Until the intramural season starts in November, though, I'll have plenty to work on on- and off-ice.

--I've managed to make my lateral movement and back crossovers more comfortable by adjusting how I put my left skate on and pushing my toes toward the front of the boot. Unfortunately, it seems like this setup is at the cost of good tight turns because now the little bit of space is in my heel, but nonetheless, my tight turns in both directions absolutely need work.
--Speaking of back crossovers, I should definitely work on those too. I can do them, just not terribly well, and at a certain speed, I start to lose control. If I can do forward crossovers at high speeds, I should be able to do the same backwards, in both directions.
--Stops and starts. I should work on my hockey stops more, especially since 95% of my stops happen with just my front foot, and the back foot just kind of stutters on the ice. I don't know if I should learn how to do a T-stop separately, or just keep working on hockey stops until my back foot figures out what to do. More importantly, though, I need to be able to start again quickly after I've stopped. It doesn't help that sometimes my feet drag on a stop, especially if I'm stopping at high speeds, but it's becoming a consistent problem that I'm too slow to react and make my next move after I come to stop.
--I've finally found a good core workout that seems to be working well at least for making my muscles work consistently. Now that I have good, equipment-less workouts I can do regularly, off-ice fitness and conditioning will certainly be a goal to focus on as well.

I'll admit that I'm slightly terrified that if I can't find a way to do stick and puck work on the ice, even if I still find a way to do it off-ice, I'll lose the gains I made this past summer. But until the time comes, I'm just going to keep working and improving what I can.

Thanks for reading!

Sticktime 8-17-13

After a scheduling snafu that meant no sticktime on Friday night, I went back out after calling the rink beforehand to make sure sticktime was happening Saturday night. 8:30-10:00pm, and I really needed it after not being on the ice for 9 days and having my soul slowly eaten up by moving to a new house.

I felt awkward on my skates at first, but that feeling dissipated quickly. I still have problems with my left skate because of the size discrepancy, but ever since I started putting my toes up toward the front of the boot, I've seen a marked improvement in my skating comfort and slightly higher proficiency in my skating ability. Hockey skating is starting to become a much more automatic endeavor, a huge improvement over my days where I had to think about every movement that wasn't straight forward and back skating. My crossovers backward and forward in both directions are improving, and my heel transitions are so much smoother than at the start of the summer. Skating at Sabby's clinics have really helped my skating skills even though they weren't the primary focus of going to the clinics.

For about the first fifteen minutes, there was only one goalie because the other goalie was still getting dressed. I spent most of my time in the goalie-less end while everyone else was skating in and shooting on the goalie. More ice for me. I practiced taking slap shots against the boards, and I'm actually getting legitimate slap shots off. Without taking video and slowing the whole motion down, I don't know if my stick actually flexes at all on the shot (I'm trying to get used to an 85 flex rating and work my strength up toward it), but the shots coming off my stick tonight were legitimate slap shots instead of just slap attempts at the puck that barely slide across the ice. Of course, those pitiful slap attempts also happened, so consistency is the new issue with my slap shots, but now that I have more confidence that I can actually pull it off, maybe it'll actually become a weapon in my shot arsenal.

Once the second goalie showed up on the ice, we skated around and shot pucks while I did some mild skating drills. One of the guys brought the net to the other end of the ice, and we had a 3-on-3 scrimmage using the space of the offensive zone.

The best player on the ice was on the other team. Pretty much no one could stop him, and even three of us had a rough time actually getting the puck off him. Thankfully, he tried to get his teammates involved, and whenever that happened, it generally turned out in our favor. They scored some goals, of course, because that's just what happens when you allow a ton of shots like that. But my teammates were awesome, even if they were pretty happy to jump up in the play and miss the guy waiting in front of our net for a pass and an easy goal.

I don't know where this jump in my play came from, but even though the other guy pretty much walked over us for most of the night, I played my best stretch of hockey . . . literally ever. I had some pretty tough turnovers and missed passes, but I caught 90% of passes given to me (compared to about 20% before), I broke up a lot more plays that I usually do (though that's pretty easy to do when you can just anticipate that the other two players are just going to pass to the best player on their team), and I put a bunch of shots on net. I scored only two or three goals (compared to the other guy's 12 or 13), but I set up my teammates for lots of good shots, and my skating wasn't a hindrance. I still need to learn how to play along the boards, and I still need to remember to keep focus on the man in front of me and keeping his upper body in front of me, and I need to cut down on the dumb turnovers, but compared to the rest of the times I've played hockey before? I was lights out tonight.

I do have one major concern health-wise, looking forward. I've been drinking a lot of water this summer. It's pretty necessary considering lots of Los Angeles days this summer have reached the upper 90s and even 100+ degrees Fahrenheit. But even when I drink plenty of water beforehand, I still reach a point when I'm playing where my head feels tight in my helmet, and I start feeling like I need water. Badly. Thankfully, I've never needed to get off the ice or receive medical attention because of dehydration, but I wonder what else I can do during hockey sessions to improve my hydration. I've considered just simply drinking more water in the middle of playing, but there are two problems I run into almost all the time: 1) it gets really uncomfortable to get back on the ice quickly if I drink too much water, so I essentially take myself out of the game to focus on rehydrating and 2) for sticktimes, and even during Sabby's clinic, I don't really get a chance to sit on the bench for an extended period of time. Of course, I'm not looking to stay on the bench because I love playing, but I definitely need to improve my conditioning and somehow improve my hydration during hockey.

This is almost certainly going to be the last sticktime I go to until December when I return home for Christmas. Unless I can find something in Providence that's easy to go to by bus or by foot (with all my equipment in tow without my own car), it'll be a lot of off-ice work until the intramural season starts in November. I might be able to go to Sabby's clinic one last time on Thursday before I fly out the next Wednesday, but that remains to be seen. I just really hope I can maintain the gains I've made this summer and improve on what was a fun but stellarly lackluster first season of hockey.

Sabby's Clinic 8-1-13

I better get to writing this before I forget everything.

Thursday, I went to the Valley Ice Center for a session of Sabby's Clinic. There were about 10-12 of us, so we got to see a wide variety of players and skill levels. I can definitely learn a lot by watching some of these guys, and a few others are pretty awesome at this hockey thing. Almost like they've been playing it for longer than I have.

As is usual, we started off the session warming up and just shooting pucks around like a regular sticktime session. I mostly like getting some skating work in, especially to get my heart rate going since I need to work on my conditioning, but skating work during this period allows me to work on my skating with pads on as opposed to most other times I work on skating exclusively. That's not to say I didn't shoot a couple pucks or do some light stickhandling before the drills started, but there was one especially proud moment early on in the clinic. I brought my Warrior Mac Daddy out for the second time on the ice, and when I went to load up for my first slap shot, I hit that sucker right on the money. It wasn't a particularly hard or fast shot (on an absolute scale), but my form was pretty good, especially since I was skating into it instead of practicing from a stand-still position, I got good wood (composite) on it, and I could actually see the puck spinning as it traveled about thigh-high off the ice and into the net, glove-side. I took only one other slap shot all day, and it wasn't anywhere near as good as that one was. Probably my best slap shot ever. I'm really happy with my new hockey stick.

All our drills used the entire ice. For our first drill, we lined up behind the goal line on one corner. (I seriously thought we were going to do suicides on the ice, which would have probably killed a lot of us.) We skate up the ice with a puck to the opposite blue line. Once there, pivot and skate backwards, making a full circle around the entire neutral zone before doing a heel transition to skate forward again and take a shot on net, then get back in line. I don't know what this drill is called, and if there is a Youtube video of it that I can show to make it clearer, I'd certainly appreciate it. This drill definitely tested our puck control as much as our skating ability.

Because I only get to do these things a few times, I try to go as fast as I possibly can. This means that I inevitably screw the drill up, usually by losing the puck, so I slow the drill down by a lot trying to get the puck back and pick up from where I left off. Since I can't exactly do this slowly and practice it to get it up to speed, I'm not entirely sure how to evaluate my approach. If I could come to the rink and practice like this more often than once a week, then I'd happily do it slowly until I worked my way up to speed, but since I do a drill like this only at most 3 times on one side, I figure I'd benefit more from pushing the pace since it gets my game speed instincts sharper and gives me more of a workout. It's unfortunate because I do lose the puck a fair bit, so I'd like to be able to get sharper on drills like this, but I think a nice benefit is learning to deal with my own mistakes and trying to take everything in stride. The game doesn't stop to let me correct a mistake, so I better get used to figuring out how I would address something like losing the puck while backskating or trying to keep the puck while turning from back to forward skating.

After finishing this drill on the other side of the ice, we then formed two lines behind the same goal line and at each corner. Side one would start with the puck. Side one and side two would skate toward each other through the crease while side one passes the puck off. Side two guy carries the puck while both guys skate toward the boards then up ice to the first blue line. Both guys turn while the puck carrier passes the puck across the blue line. Skate to the boards again and up through the neutral zone before skating across the width of the opposite blue line, again passing the puck. When both players skate up ice again, skate in on the goalie and prepare for a shot on goal or a one-timer. Line up behind the opposite goal line and prepare to do it again, going up ice in the opposite direction.

This drill went predictably awful for me because even though I had an ok time handling and making passes (which I'm getting better at in general, but again, I really think my new hockey stick helps a lot especially since I have a better idea of where on the blade I want to catch the pass and because I have a lot of blade to work with), I had a tough time keeping the puck while I was turning at the boards to skate up ice. This made for some awkward moments where my drill partner would park himself at the far post waiting for a one-timer which I eventually fed to him. They weren't the greatest passes, but I still think he could have done better with getting a one-timer on net. We all have stuff to work on.

There was one unfortunate moment in this drill. On the whistle, one guy and I started. I received the pass through the crease to start. We skated toward each other at full speed, but it was too late for the both of us to realize we were going to hit each other. Him being the bigger and stronger guy, I got the worse of the contact, getting hit in the left shoulder and chest and knocked on my ass into the net (since we hit each other in the crease). It didn't hurt per se, and like any hockey player, I got up and kept going with the drill. It was actually a pretty gnarly hit even though I didn't get hurt, especially since I wasn't expecting it. I was expecting him to skate in front of the crease while I would carry the puck through the crease, but I was a little too far forward in my lane, so BAM! Full-on contact. Now I know what it means to get the wind knocked out of you. I was fine and felt no more aftereffects of the hit after about 10 minutes, but my chest and shoulder felt a little bit tighter directly after contact.

We finished the drill portion of the clinic with a backward skating drill. We lined up along the boards, two lines at opposite blue lines along the boards on opposite sides of the ice. (This drill is going to be a doozy to explain without video.) On the whistle, player one starts skating backwards toward the other blue line. Player two sends him a pass which player one skates to the middle of the ice before passing to a waiting guy in the other line. After passing, player one pivots backwards to the boards and gets the pass back from the waiting guy in the other line before skating back up ice and giving the puck back to player two, the guy he got the puck from in the first place when he skated back to the opposite blue line. He gets the pass back again as he skates up ice for a shot on goal. Got that? Good, because it was a bit confusing at first on the ice, but there was a pattern to it and we eventually got a good rhythm for it.

Essentially, there are four players doing something in one drill rep. The players in the front of the line are doing the skating, first skating backward to the opposite blue line then receiving the pass, skating across the blue line and giving the puck up to the guy waiting in the other line. They pivot from forward to backward and get the puck back before skating to the boards and passing to the next guy in his original line. Skating guy gets the puck back as he's going up ice and shoots on the goalie. The guys in line directly behind skating guy (or the second guys in line) stay where they are until the next whistle for them to skate, but they're also participating in the drill. They make the first pass to the back-skating guy, then receive a pass from the guy doing the same drill on the opposite side. They give the puck back and then receive another pass from the guy skating up ice before giving the puck up to him for a shot on net and get ready to skate on the whistle. As terribly as I have been at trying to explain it, the rest of us were actually pretty good at this drill, once we got the hang of where we and the pucks were supposed to go. I didn't have too many problems handling the puck, and there were only a couple errant passes.

We ended the clinic with a full ice 5-on-5 scrimmage. I got two breaks, about a minute long each. I started at center before eventually being put, predictably, back on defense (mostly because of a substitution since he was the only man back and I had to stay there), though I struggled keeping people in front of me more than I usually do. I was actually pretty useless in my own zone for this game.

One good thing that happened for me: After the other team couldn't hit the bar (we only had one goalie), I picked the puck up and started skating up ice on the left side. Pretty much no one came near me until I got to the blue line, and even then, I had a head of steam going up ice so I backed the defense off pretty well. I had a guy on the right side open, so I sent him a hard pass that went off the stick of the defenseman but landed on my teammate's tape anyway. He fired a shot top glove, across the net that sent pretty much everybody in a tizzy because, yeah, it was an awesome shot. The best part about getting the primary assist on this goal? The guy who scored was the guy who hit me earlier in the crease during the weaving drill. Yeah. No hard feelings.

Player Card

Name: Joseph Cadabes

Position: D, C

Height: 5'9"

Weight: 140 lbs.

Career Statistics

Year	League	Team	GP	G	A	P
'12-'13	Brown Intramural Mid Division	Motley Crew	6	0	0	0

Bio: Joseph began skating in the summer of 2012 before deciding to join a friend of a friend's intramural hockey team. Having only a pair of skates to claim as his own, and receiving a very sudden notice on the day of his first game that there was in fact a game that night, he managed to slog his way through 6 games against varying levels of hockey-playing college kids with all his extremities intact despite never learning to play the game and only skating for a few months beforehand.

Hockey Journal 7-25-13

As much as I look forward to any ice time I can get, I'm most likely not going to get my money's worth when it comes to these hockey lessons.

When I first started my ice skating lessons last summer at Pickwick Ice in Burbank, I lucked out quite a bit. I had already been skating before, at least a dozen times over the previous two winters at downtown Providence's Kennedy Plaza, but I decided that since I'd never had any formal instruction whatsoever, I'd likely be better off starting from the very beginning. It worked out marvelously. My mom and uncle and I all took the class for the first half of the summer, and since I already knew how to stand on skates and get around (albeit very slowly at the time) and stay on my feet, my instructor started me off a little further. It was a small class, so while the time was short--it was only a 30 minute lesson--she very capably gave all five of us in the class individual attention.

After the halfway point, the second half of the summer was structured like a second semester for the skating school, so it was a separate registration. I decided to keep going, and exactly no one else in the class continued after the first six weeks. So as I mentioned, I lucked out quite a bit: paid for a class and wound up being the only one in the class, so I essentially got private lessons. Even though I didn't technically start from zero knowledge about ice skating when I first started, I still made great progress by the time I had to fly back to Providence for my junior year.

My general thought process went exactly the same way before I decided to take hockey lessons. I basically went through a baptism by fire in deciding to play a mid-division intramural league after having absolutely no experience playing hockey at all, but like my skating, I had never received any formal instruction before, so I thought taking a class from the same place I learned my skating would work well because the idea worked beautifully last time.

The first lesson proved quite ominous when the instructor asked me, "So what do you want to work on?" as if he didn't already have something planned. Sure, I had played before, but I was still really new to everything, really green. I had no idea what to work on or what to practice out of the myriad skills involved with playing the game. Even my skating needed work, but I didn't shell out the money or get on the ice to not make use of my hockey stick to try to get better at playing the game.

The class itself also isn't terribly conducive to my improvement. Whereas last year, my skating instructor could give people individual attention, to the point of me getting private lessons in the second half of the summer, this year, I'm in a hockey class with 5 other kids who couldn't possibly be older than 10. Given that my instructor is the only other physically mature skater out there, he's the only one on my level that I can practice with to get better, but since he's the instructor, he also has to tend to the kids to make sure they're getting some work in too. It's a tough job since he probably wasn't expecting someone like me to be participating in the class, and while I wish I could do more or learn more, I think he's done a decent job of keeping me engaged while he also has an eye on the kids.

All that said, though, I really could be using my time (and the money spent on the class) better elsewhere. I could go to the "Pickwick power play" they have late on Wednesday nights, but there's the simple problem of it being late at night--10pm to midnight. My instructor also told me about some other group of roller hockey players making the adjustment to ice hockey that meets Friday nights . . . at midnight, until about 2:30am. Granted, it is a Friday night, but I also hate sleeping in, which is very likely what would happen on Saturday mornings.

Where I did find something for me was a weekly clinic at the Valley Ice Center. Sabby's Clinic on Thursdays from noon until 1:30pm. I went a couple weeks ago, and for my level (which, I'll admit, is pretty difficult to determine because I'm not an absolute beginner, and my skating can probably make me look better than I actually am, but it's still a struggle to feel competent at times), it was perfect: we started with warmups where we could just skate and shoot around, then we did a couple drills that were very nicely paced and got us practicing various skills and getting a workout in, and we finished with a scrimmage. (I was terribly overmatched by a few of the highly skilled players, but I'll only get better by playing people better than I am and reaching their level.) If I had started the summer doing that, for the same amount of money I put into my hockey lessons, I could have gone to 8 clinics, learned more, practiced more intensely, and gotten a chance to get into game situations.

Alas, the Pickwick hockey lessons are now a sunk cost, but it's really difficult to pass up the ice time. I'll probably go to Pickwick for another lesson next week, but after that, I think I'll spend August going to Sabby's Clinic. I can't really go to both because my lessons are Wednesday night and Sabby's Clinic is Thursday afternoon; I wouldn't get as much out of Sabby's Clinic on the inevitably low energy that I would have if I decided to go to both. (Side note: I should probably improve my conditioning by about 1000-fold.) I'll see how I feel after next week. Maybe I'll be surprised, but I think I've got my plans set for August hockey, and I have a very strong feeling I'll be spending it in the Valley.

Missing History

So, uh, hi.

Welcome to The Bruised Brother. For those of you who don't immediately follow the allusion, it's an homage to the "Bruise Brothers" nickname given to the duo of Bob Probert and Joey Kocur who terrorized the NHL in the mid-late '80s as members of the Detroit Red Wings. Probert would end up having a much better scoring touch at the NHL level than Kocur, and Kocur would get his name on the Stanley Cup, but they both spent plenty of time pummeling people and sitting in the penalty box.

The blog name inspiration stems from these two things: my reading of Probert's autobiography Tough Guy: My Life on the Edge,* and my progression as a hockey player from know-nothing newbie to know-something plug. I really wish I were alive to have seen Probert play for the Red Wings, but at least I got to see Kocur on the Grind Line with Kris Draper and Kirk Maltby en route to winning Stanley Cups. But the Bruise Brothers theme puts the stamp on this blog as a Red Wings blog.

Learning to play hockey's been a very rewarding and exciting and frustrating experience. I've yet to play full contact hockey, but even without that, I'm still going to bet there will be a few bumps or bruises, both literally and metaphorically, as I try to establish myself as a relevant player. (SPHL, here I come?)

I had another blog previously, and though it hasn't yet been deleted, it will be once I wipe the entire Google account associated with that particular blogspot. It chronicled my first year of skating and playing hockey, and while I looked back, at the encouragement of a friend, on the archives with fond memories, I really didn't find anything particularly worth keeping. So once that Google account is deleted, that whole record will be wiped from the face of the Internet.†

So consider this a continuation of that blog, if you followed it before. If not, welcome to the journey.

*In the wake of other notable NHL enforcer deaths--Wade Belak, Rick Rypien, and Derek Boogaard--the book is a great read for insight into the enforcer mindset. "I protect my teammates, not score." (Though Probert did plenty of scoring early in his career).

†Yes, I know this is the Internet, where nothing every truly dies.

Hockey Journal 7-24-13

Last Wednesday, I went to the rink early to get my skates sharpened before my hockey lesson. It had been a year since I got my skates sharpened, but I never really noticed that drastic a dip in performance, and I skated for some pretty intense workouts frequently over the course of the first year of owning my first pair of skates. Pretty much, the only real problem I sometimes had with them was stopping, since I wouldn't stop very cleanly sometimes, even to the point of traveling another 5 feet in a very choppy motion while I tried to stop. But largely, I had no problems sharpening my skates in August and not doing so since then.

 While the guy behind the counter was sharpening my skates, I was going through the stick rack. Lots of Eastons. Lots, and lots of Eastons. They were shelved blade up, so I got a good look at the blades of the sticks since they were right in front of my face.

Then I found it. A Warrior Mac Daddy stick.* Jovanovski curve. I had a to wait a few days to scrounge up enough money (thanks, Mom!) before I could buy it, but I got it at a marked-down $75, and the shop gave me 10% off too. After having it for a day and about to take it onto the ice tonight for my hockey lesson, I'm so ridiculously happy with it.

I can't find any info on specs for the materials used, and I'm an amateur at best at identifying them, but it's a one-piece composite (not sure if fused or true one-piece), 85 flex, and as mentioned a Jovanovski curve. I've been looking for a stick with a square toe curve for a while because I have a terrible time getting the puck off the boards with rounded toe sticks. The only other square toe I could find these days is on a Getzlaf curve, but I've only ever seen those available in separate blade + shaft combos (and I don't have the money for the two pieces together). A nice bonus with this stick is the long blade, longer than any blade on any of my other hockey sticks, so I should get much better at receiving passes than with my Sherwood 9950 or Easton SY50.

I'll be doing a separate product review of the stick in the future, and I'll also be doing a video of how I tape my sticks using this Warrior Mac Daddy as my guinea pig. I can't wait to take it out on the ice tonight.

*I don't particularly vouch for that review, but it's literally the only video on this stick I can find on Youtube or on a Google search. Also, I don't really care much for the name "Mac Daddy," but that's what it's called.