Ken Yackel skills practice

Well, y’all are just stuck with more hockey updates since it’s STILL FRICKIN’ RAINING and I haven’t been riding. What the hell? If I’d wanted weather, I’d have stayed in Wisconsin.

A bunch of us showed up for the normal 3:10pm hockey skills class at Ice Oasis yesterday, only to find that it was actually day 2 of 3 of Ken Yackel’s Hockey School. Oops.

This made it an interesting practice for both good and bad reasons. The good is obvious: Ken’s a really good instructor and has a lot of great tips about hockey. The bad was that there were at least 30 people there, so the ice was pretty crowded, and most of them were intermediate to advanced players. So the drills really focused on more advanced skills than I have.

It was still fun to try the drills, though I had no chance of actually practicing the intended skill (pass quickly to my own backhand to deke around a defenseman and then lift the puck up into the net? Maybe next year. 😉 ).

The most useful part of the class for me came right at the beginning when we focused on backwards skating. So far, I’ve been able to backwards swizzle without total incompetence, and do some lame approximation of a backwards C-cut. My right foot can C-cut, but my left foot does this spaghetti limp thing like it’s not actually attached to my central nervous system. [A C-cut is when one foot theoretically moves in a straight line while the other skate provides the power by pushing off in a C-shape. It’s actually more of a half-heart motion, but I guess “c-cut” is quicker to say]

Kinda like this…please note that my Photoshop skills are about as good as my C-cut skills…

So anyway, Ken had us doing this stationary drill where we straightened one leg while bending the other knee, all the while staying on both inside edges (it’s pretty easy if your legs are far enough apart). Then he had us do that same motion while skating backwards. This was pretty easy for me, and I actually got a little bit of speed up…which is when one of the other instructors mentioned something about “really digging in on that C-cut”. This was just another way of looking at the C-cut! But calling it something else made it click in my mind. Yay!

I know I wasn’t bending my knees enough while doing the drill, so that’ll give me something to practice at my next public skate.

Not much hockey this week — normal skating class on Wednesday, and NCWHL Green practice a week from today. Good news, though, since it’ll let my shoulder heal more. It’s been doing well except when I try to put any power behind a shot; I guess that movement really hits the AC joint. I really need practice shooting/puck handling, too, so it’s a good thing that I don’t have practices during this week. Hopefully the shoulder will have healed enough to let me really give it my all next Sunday.