Trapping & Receiving

Hi, everyone, and welcome to a new video. Obviously, trapping and receiving is really important in hockey. And today we’re going to be talking about various ways to track the ball and to receive the ball. So let’s go

All right, so there’s many different ways in which you can receive the ball. And today, I want to talk about a few. And the first one I want to talk about is receiving strong, and that you’re actually trying to protect the ball. This is a really important reception. Because more often than open receiving, you’re actually receiving the ball with your back to the goal. And usually there’s a defender in your back. So that’s what we call strong receiving. And the most important thing when receiving strong is that you have a wide stance, so that it’s hard for the defender to get the stick around to get the ball. And what you’re going to try and do is you’re going to try and bring and reach out and stretch your right arm to make sure you can receive the ball just about a nice distance from your foot. So not here next to your foot where the defender can grab it. But you’re actually going to try and receive the ball with a stretch, right arm, the left arm will have a bit of a bend, but the right arm needs to be strong in front of your right foot. And from here, it’s really hard for the defender to grab the ball. So say you’re in the game, and you’re coming from a certain position into the ball, and you see the ball coming, that’s when you want to do, what you want to do is you want to sort of hit the brakes, bend your knees, try and get your right hand around this height of the of the grips and nearly near the bottom, you can go a bit lower, if you want to go down to the ground, that’s fine. But make sure you don’t go too high. If you go too high, then it’s really difficult to control the ball and you get more stability if you have your stick in the middle of your hand in the middle of the stick. So left hand at the top stretched right arm. And from here, if the ball enters towards your right foot, that’s where you want to keep it and you want to keep it there. And from here, you can either run that way and use your right leg to protect or if the defender comes from the right side receiving here, then you can also turn this way and try and be strong like that.

Alright, so an extension on after receiving the ball is that you can use your right leg to to protect the ball. So when you’re practicing this, don’t just practice the trap. But also, once you’ve checked the ball, you can practice to sort of move rights with your right foot like this, to make sure you can protect the ball. So you can always practice by going this way to protect and then this way to protect the ball. It’s also really important when you receive the ball with your back to go that you protect it. And that you try and look around if maybe there’s teammates open to pass, but at first you can protect the ball. What I like to do, for example, in a game is when I receive the ball, I like to go to the right with my right foot. And then I can maybe step back, create some space and try and look for a pass. So that’s the part of trapping with protecting with your right foot. Okay, so trapping a flat pass is obviously easier than a bouncing pass. But also when the ball is bouncing, the technique is a little bit different. So what we’re going to do now is we’re going to talk about how to receive the ball when it’s bouncing. And like I said before the ball is flat, this is your position that you want to take. However, if you see that the ball is bouncing, what we’re going to try and do is we’re going to bring a right hand down a bit lower, and we’re going to try and move our stick a bit more upright. Why? Because then if you don’t know whether the ball comes here, or here, you’re going to trap it, if you have your stick like this in the air or on the bottom, if it just bounces over, it’s much more difficult to chat the ball. So we’re going to try and do is we’re going to turn our stick like this to make sure we have a bit of a shield or a platform where we can actually trap the ball. Alright, so a few things are important when we’re trapping like this, as you can see in the in the first few shots is that even if you turn your stick a bit like this, and it tends to touch this side, it’s going to bounce that way. It’s not so bad, because if it bounces that way, at least it’s to your forehand, at least you can still control it after. The second thing is after you’ve actually trapped it. What you’re going to try and do is you’re going to try and bring the ball back down to the turf. So if the ball bounces up, and you trap it here, then what you can do after is you can tap the top of the ball with your stick to make sure it goes down to the turf, and then you can continue in control. The last thing is when you turn your stick, try and bring your left arm out and stretch your left arm to make sure that the stick is vertical like this. So you’re running in you see the ball has a bounce. That’s when you turn your left hand like that. And then you get a vertical stick. And then it’s easier to control and bring your right hand down a bit. And from here, you can control the ball, like that.

Okay, so now we’ve looked at receiving strong and receiving a bouncing pass. But also, if the ball comes on the backhand, it’s also important to be able to receive strong and to protect the ball. So if the ball comes towards the backhand side, obviously, if we’re receiving open, we can just let it roll. And then we can continue our run. However, in this case, we’re receiving strong and closed. So when the ball comes there, the defenders in our back, we can’t just receive there, because then a defender is going to come from the back is going to try and steal the ball. So what can we do, we can try, flip our arms around like this, make it across, so you get your open receive, but then you’re going to move your right foot, your left foot behind the ball. So if the defendant comes in with the stick, you can protect it with your foot. And then the most important thing is when you receive you actually bring the ball back to your forehand. So that’s we’re going to practice now.

All right, so a good exercise to do this is to practice your receiving on this side. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to continue and add a shot. So say you’re in this situation, you’re the D, and you’re going to try and trap the ball there. You want to bring it back and then hit the reverse, so we’re gonna do that a few times.