Should my kid do power skating during the hockey season?

Count the week before you add to it

An extra hour on the ice is rarely a bad hour on its own. The real question is what that hour comes out of. By the time a family is asking about in-season skating work, the week is usually close to full, which makes this a subtraction problem dressed up as an addition problem.

So before deciding anything, write the week down as it actually runs. Not the version on the team schedule — the version that includes the drive to a rink in another municipality, the twenty minutes in the parking lot afterwards, and the time your player walks back in the door. List:

• every on-ice item: practices, games, any skills session already included in registration
• any second roster your player is on, including a school team or games they get called up for
• off-ice or dryland work, including anything the team does on its own
• travel time both ways for each one
• the finish time of each item, not just how long it runs
• the evenings with no hockey in them at all

Now the arithmetic is honest. A week with one game, one practice and one arena has room in it. It is the easiest week in the hockey year to fit a block into, and the least likely to be asking this question. A week already running five days across several arenas usually does not have room, and the honest move there is to take an hour out rather than add one, which is what the section on cutting is for.

What turns the count into an answer is two more questions. Is there a night where the session would not be the second thing on the same day? And does your player finish that evening without being wrung out? If the answer to both is yes, a fuller week can still carry a block. If every candidate night is stacked on top of something else, the count has answered you, and the rest of this page is about what to do instead.

If your player is a goalie, do the same count, then ask a different question about content. A skater session is built around a forward stride and is not aimed at how a goalie moves, so ask directly what an hour would contain for a goalie before booking one. Everything else here applies to a goalie exactly as it does to a skater: the count, the state they turn up in, and which weeks are worth using. It is the content of the hour that is the separate question, not the timing of it.

Ask what the team's practice ice is actually being used for

Team practice tends to drift toward the next game as a season goes on, and that drift is structural rather than a failing of your player's coach — preparing a team and rebuilding one player's stride are two different jobs. The power skating guide sets out why a team practice may not fix a stride, along with the question that comes before this one: whether skating is the thing holding your player back at all. Booking the wrong fix into a full week is worse than booking nothing.

What is worth doing mid-season is checking it yourself. Watch one full practice from the stands and keep a rough tally of two things: how much of the hour your player spends in drills that are mainly about where to go, and how many times anyone says anything to your player about how they are moving. If the answer to the second one is never, you have found the gap. That gap is what a block of consecutive weeks fills, when it fills anything.

It is also worth telling your player's coach that skating work is happening outside the team, rather than keeping quiet about it. Parents often hesitate there, because saying it out loud sounds like a complaint about the coaching, and it is not one. A coach who knows what is being worked on can reinforce it in a drill they were running anyway, and can tell you what they are seeing from the bench, which is a better view than the one you have from the stands.

Some teams' practice ice is already doing part of that work. If yours is, the case for adding is weaker, and it is worth saying so to yourself before you book.

A tired repetition is a repetition of something else

This is the part most in-season decisions turn on, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the coaching. A technique session is an hour of repetitions, and what those repetitions do for your player depends on the state they arrive in. A tired rep is not a slightly worse rep. It is a rep of something else.

Fatigue in a skating session usually does not look like slowness. It looks like effort. The player is still going hard, often harder, and precision is what leaves. Edges go flat, the weight drifts back over the heels, and the crossover loses its under-push: the player steps the outside foot over and lets the inside leg come along instead of finishing the push under the body. From the glass, a parent sees a kid working. The coach sees an hour spent rehearsing the exact pattern the session was booked to change.

That turns a scheduling detail into the whole decision. The same hour does two different things depending on where it sits in the week:

• an early-evening session on a day with no other hockey in it
• a nine o'clock session on a school night, after a practice and a drive across town

That is the same hour on the schedule. It is not the same decision. Late finishes eat into the evening, which is why the finish time of each item belongs on the list you wrote in the first section.

It matters for content, too. A tired player can still push hard. Holding an edge and keeping the upper body quiet while they do it tends to be what leaves first, and that is exactly what the Sawkins Hybrid Method is built to develop. Explosive work on a player with nothing left is the easiest hour in the week to waste, because the part of the hour that survives fatigue is the part that was already easy for them.

What happens between the sessions decides whether anything sticks

Adding ice does not by itself change a habit. Every stride a player takes rehearses the pattern they already have, including the strides at practice, in warm-up, and on the way back to the line. That cuts both ways. It is why a habit is stubborn, and it is also where the free work is.

Expect the game to be the last place a change shows up. During a shift, attention is on the puck, the read, the pressure and the bench. A new pattern still needs attention. The old one does not. Under that kind of competing demand, the automatic pattern wins. A parent watching Saturday for evidence that Tuesday worked is applying the hardest possible test, far too early, and will usually conclude it failed before it has had a chance.

What a player can do on the ice they already have

• the first few minutes of practice warm-up, before the tempo climbs, skated deliberately
• the skate back to the line after a rush, done properly instead of as a glide
• one cue for the week, carried into a drill they were already doing
• checking their own work instead of waiting to be told

A goalie's version of that list is built on their own movements rather than on a stride, but the principle is the same: the movements repeated without thinking are the ones being trained. How much a player can absorb between sessions depends on where they are in the basics. A player who can stop both ways, turn both ways and skate backwards without thinking about it has room to take a correction; a player still thinking about the stop has less.

And the technical correction shouted from the stands is not help — it is the worst moment and the worst form for it, as the companion page on when to start sets out.

The breaks in the schedule are where in-season work actually fits

The Ontario hockey year is not one continuous block, and the gaps in it are the most useful thing on your schedule for this decision.

The winter holidays are the clearest example. Where an association pauses team activity over the school break, ice that is tied up through the season can come free. Schedules vary between associations and arenas, so check what is actually running near you rather than assuming the window exists. Where non-team ice does exist in that stretch, it tends to be a short run of consecutive days instead of a single scattered hour, which is a useful shape for a player who is skating well and has one specific thing to change.

The caveats matter as much as the window. A pause is not universal, and a holiday tournament can sit right inside it, so “the team is off” and “the family is free” are two different sentences. A player who has been dragging since late in the fall may simply need the break to be a break, and if that is your situation it has already been spent well.

The same logic applies to the other soft spots: a long weekend with no tournament in it, the March break for families who are in town, and the stretch once the season and its evaluations are behind you. That last one is the biggest, because no team obligation is competing for the legs. Check your own association's calendar, not the one a teammate's family is on.

Tournament weekends, the playoff stretch and the run-up to evaluations

Some weeks are not technique weeks, and pretending otherwise wastes them. A tournament weekend with several games in two days, a playoff series, a run of double-headers — in those weeks less input is usually the useful call. A technique block half-attended through a heavy game stretch does not produce half the change. It mostly produces a tired player and a coach starting over each time. Not every season has those weeks in it, though. A schedule with no tournaments and no playoff run has far fewer weeks that need protecting, which means far more of it is usable.

That is an argument for choosing your timing at the start of a season, while there is still a schedule to choose from: put a block of consecutive weeks somewhere with room around it, instead of dropping sessions into whatever is left over.

Seasons do not hold still, and a booked block will sometimes collide with a game moved into it. There are two workable answers and one bad one. You can miss the single session and carry on, which costs a week of momentum on one correction. You can pause the block and restart it once the schedule settles, which is the better call when the disruption is a stretch and not a night. The bad answer is attending everything and arriving flattened for all of it. Either way, tell the coach running the block what changed. A coach who knows a player came straight from a game will spend the hour on something that survives tired legs.

Evaluations deserve a plain answer. In many associations the rep evaluation period lands somewhere from around mid-April into May. It differs between associations and levels, and some placement or house league evaluations happen in the fall instead, so work from your own association's calendar. Either way, a session booked shortly before evaluations is very unlikely to show up in them. Technique changes on a timeline nobody can promise, and the final stretch before an evaluation is for arriving fresh and confident, not for being handed something new to think about. If evaluations are what is really driving the question, the page on preparing for tryouts covers that properly.

Those two stretches can be the same weeks, and that is worth being plain about. If your team's games finish and evaluations follow shortly after, that gap is not a technique window. It is the run-in to an evaluation, and it is for arriving fresh. The clear stretch usually comes later, once evaluations are settled: through July and most of August, before team activity picks back up toward the end of August. Which of those you are looking at depends on your own association's calendar rather than on the general shape of the year.

If something has to give, be specific about what

Sometimes the skating work is clearly the right call and the week genuinely has no room in it. That is a real situation with real answers, and every one of them involves taking something out.

Candidates worth looking at first:

• a second scrimmage-style skate or drop-in that is mostly more of what games already provide
• off-ice work that duplicates something the team is already doing
• an optional tournament that turns a free weekend into a travel weekend
• a second sport at its heaviest in the same stretch, counted as a line item in a week that has to lose something

A second hockey roster is the hardest of these to cut and usually the largest single line in the week. If one is in there, count it first and decide the rest around it.

What should not be the thing you cut: the one evening with nothing in it, a reasonable bedtime on a school night, and time to do school work at a sensible hour. How much rest a player needs is a question for your own family rather than for a skating coach. But a player who is at the rink more and at home less is not automatically getting better at hockey, and what a tired repetition actually rehearses is covered above.

There is also a setting between going and not going: shorten the block instead of cancelling it. A short run of consecutive weeks through a quiet stretch does more for a pattern than the same number of hours scattered across the season around games, tournaments and school nights, because a pattern changes through repetition close together rather than through an hour here and an hour two months later.

One practical thing about starting partway through a season. Ice is at its tightest in the middle of the year, so ask whether a block beginning mid-season means joining a run already underway or waiting for the next one to open. Both can work, and the answer changes your timing more than it changes the session. It is a better question to ask before you rearrange the week than after.

An hour is an hour, so format does not change what a session takes out of the week — it changes what is in it. The formats are laid out on the services page.

When the honest answer is no, or not yet

A fair amount of the time the answer is no, and a page that never says so is not much use to anyone.

No, if the week is already five days and your player is dragging by Thursday. Fix the week first. The session will still be there.

No, if your player does not want to go. Worth separating, though: resistance to a nine o'clock session on a school night is usually about the slot rather than about skating, and a different night sometimes answers it. If they do not want to work on their skating at all, that is a different question from this one.

No, if it is being bought as insurance against an evaluation result. It does not work that way, and players are often quicker to work out why they were booked in than parents expect.

No, if the only reason anyone has offered is that other families on the team are doing something extra. That is a reason to ask what your own player needs, not to match someone else's schedule.

Not yet, if the week could be clear later on, around the holidays or once the season and its evaluations are behind you, and the thing you want changed is not on fire. A stride is built over years and does not come apart over a few weeks. A stretch without a dedicated session costs momentum on one correction, not the skating underneath it. Waiting for the off-season is a legitimate choice, and treating it that way keeps a mid-season decision from being driven by panic.

If the count comes out ambiguous, send Jessica the week as it actually runs and she will tell you honestly whether there is room in it, including when the answer is that there is not.