How to Prepare Your Child for AAA Tryouts

1. Start With the Calendar, Not the Drills

Before you plan anything, confirm the actual dates with your association. Timing and structure differ from one organization to the next, and they can change from year to year, so treat anything you hear second-hand as unconfirmed until your association publishes its own dates.

Once you have a verified date, work backwards. The blocks below are how we plan a run-up rather than a validated schedule, so treat them as rough guides and not a formula.

• Twelve to eight weeks out: in our experience this is the window where there is room for real technical change. Stride mechanics, edge control, and crossover habits are motor patterns, and they are rebuilt through repetition with feedback over weeks rather than in a weekend.
• Eight to four weeks out: make it automatic. A new correction usually exists only at slow speed at first. This block is repetition until the pattern holds without the player thinking about it, still slowly enough to be done correctly.
• Four to two weeks out: consolidate. Take the new mechanics into speed, into game-like situations, into fatigue. Stop introducing new corrections.
• The final two weeks: sharpen and protect. Maintain the feel of the ice, keep confidence high, and change nothing.

A planning error we see often is starting six weeks out and expecting a transformation. Six weeks is usually enough to clean up and sharpen. It is usually not enough to rebuild a stride from the ground up. If skating is the thing holding a player back, that work is better started well before tryout season is on anyone's mind.

The practical consequence is simple: whatever structured ice you intend to use, whether team, association, or private, decide on it while the twelve-week block is still ahead of you rather than once it has already started.

2. What Tends to Stand Out on the Ice: A Skating Coach's View

In our experience, evaluators are usually watching a lot of players in a short window, often from a distance and often without knowing every name, and that tends to shape what stands out. Skating reads clearly from the stands and the bench, because it can be read in a few strides.

In the skating portions of an evaluation, these are the things that tend to draw the eye.

• The first three steps. How quickly does the player go from stopped to moving? Do they get a real push on the first stride, or shuffle twice before they load an edge?
• Whether they hold an edge under load. Corners, tight turns, and battles all ask a skater to stay on an edge while their weight is fighting them. Players who slide off the edge and straighten up lose speed and position.
• Crossovers in both directions. Almost every player has a strong side. A weak side tends to be easy to spot from the bench, especially on backward crossovers.
• Transitions. Forward to backward and back again, in both directions, without a stutter step or a lost stride.
• Backward skating. Not just the ability to do it, but posture, depth of knee bend, and speed. For players who project as defence, backward skating is usually a larger part of the picture.
• Recovery after a pivot. An underrated tell. After a turn or a pivot, does the player get straight back into a push, or glide for a beat while they reset?
• Stopping and restarting. Stops on both sides, and how fast the skater is back to full speed afterward.
• Body control and posture. Head up, chest tall, hands away from the body, balance held on one foot. A player who is fighting their own balance has less left for making plays.
• Consistency when tired. In our view, mechanics that hold up late in a session are a better read on a skater than mechanics in the first five minutes.

Skating is not the whole picture. Hockey sense, compete level, and how a player handles instruction all matter, and different organizations weigh them differently depending on the position and what they need that year. But a player who has to think about their feet has less attention left for reading the play.

3. The Mechanics Underneath: What We Are Actually Fixing

"Skate better" is not a plan. Here is what the work usually looks like underneath, and why each piece matters.

• Edges and balance. Command of inside and outside edges on both feet, forward and backward, is the base of everything else. A player who cannot ride a clean outside edge cannot turn tightly, hold a line through traffic, or generate real power in a crossover.
• Knee and ankle flexion. A very common habit in young skaters is bending at the waist instead of the knee and ankle. It looks like effort and produces very little. Real knee bend lowers the centre of gravity, lengthens the push, and makes stops and turns stable.
• Full extension and clean recovery. The push should finish through the toe, and the recovering foot should come back under the body rather than swing wide. A wide recovery adds time to every stride, and that lost time is what a first step is made of.
• The under-push in a crossover. Many players push only with the outside leg and let the inside leg go along for the ride. The pull from the inside leg is an important source of acceleration, and it is the difference between a crossover that generates speed and one that only changes direction.
• Quiet upper body. Arms and shoulders that flail waste energy and telegraph movement. Stillness through the core is a skill, and it is trainable.
• Weak-side symmetry. Turns, crossovers, stops, and pivots on the uncomfortable side. Players avoid their weak side in games without realizing it, and it is one of the easier things for a trained eye to pick up.

None of this is exotic. It is the same list every good skating coach works through. What makes it hard is that these are habits, and habits change only with correct repetition and someone watching closely enough to catch the drift.

4. What You Can Do as a Parent, Without a Coach

Plenty of the preparation is not technical at all, and much of it costs nothing.

• Get the skates right, and get them right early. Boots that are too big, too broken down, or too stiff for the player's weight can limit ankle flexion no matter how good the instruction is. If new skates are needed, buy them with enough runway to break them in, not in the last two weeks.
• Understand the sharpening. Know what hollow your child skates on and keep it consistent. Do not experiment with a different sharpening in the run-up to tryouts. A blade that feels unfamiliar changes how a player turns and stops, and they will feel it on the first hard edge.
• Check that the gear allows movement. Shin pads and pants that block knee bend, or a helmet worn loose enough to bounce, quietly cost a player posture and confidence.
• Get more ice time, not more instruction. Public skates, shinny, outdoor ice. Volume of time on the blade builds comfort and feel in a way drills alone do not. Let them skate for fun.
• Film thirty seconds. One clip from the side, one from the corner, at real speed. Do not analyze it out loud with your child. Just look for two things yourself: are the knees bent, and is the head up?
• Handle the logistics so they do not have to. Know the schedule, arrive with time to spare, keep spare laces and tape in the bag. A player who is rushed and half-dressed on the first whistle is starting a step behind.
• Keep the routine familiar. Tryout weeks are not the time to change how your child normally prepares. Anything to do with food, sleep, or recovery is a question for your own family health professionals, not a skating coach.

Notice what is not on this list: technique coaching from the stands. Telling a player to "bend your knees" mid-drill does not teach them how. It just adds noise.

5. What Genuinely Needs a Coach

Some of this a motivated family can do alone. Four things generally cannot be, and they are the reason coaching exists.

Players cannot reliably diagnose their own skating. Under pressure and under fatigue, skaters tend to default to whatever pattern feels comfortable, which is often the flawed one. A player who has never been shown the difference between a true outside edge and a flat blade will keep practising the flat blade with total conviction.

Weak-side work almost never happens on its own. Left to themselves, players do what they are good at. Deliberate weak-side crossovers, backward transitions in the uncomfortable direction, and pivots off the non-dominant foot need a structure and someone enforcing it.

Correction requires progression. You cannot fix a stride by telling a player about it. It is rebuilt in stages: static, then slow, then at speed, then under a puck, then under fatigue, with feedback at every stage. That sequencing is the actual skill a coach brings.

Group size matters more than most families expect. A large group with a single coach is closer to a workout than to instruction. Small ratios are what make individual correction practical, because that is where a coach can watch one skater's blade and say something specific about it.

Team practices are important, but they are built around systems and puck work. There is rarely time in them to rebuild an individual's mechanics, and that is not a criticism of team coaches; it is the reality of shared ice.

6. Where Power Skating Fits Into a Tryout Plan

Mapped onto the blocks in Section 1, dedicated skating work tends to fit like this. In the twelve-to-eight-week block, more than one session a week is useful where the schedule allows it: one to introduce a correction, another to repeat it before it fades. From eight to four weeks out, the same correction gets repeated until it holds without conscious thought. From four to two weeks, the sessions stop adding material and start taking what is there into speed, fatigue, and game-like reps. In the final two weeks, keep it light, keep the feel of the blade, and add nothing.

Format should follow the fault. A single identifiable problem, such as a wide recovery, a dead weak-side crossover, or a stutter in the transition, is fastest to address in a private or semi-private session, because the correction has to be seen and named on almost every repetition. A player whose mechanics are already sound and who needs pace and pressure usually gets more from a small group. Many players preparing for an evaluation want some of both, in that order.

Jessica Sawkins came to power skating from two directions. Her competitive background is in figure skating: Canadian Champion in pairs, four-time national competitor, and a Team Canada alumna who competed internationally. She was trained by Olympic-level coaches and skated alongside Olympians and World Champions. She also played university-level competitive hockey, so the work is translated into a hockey stride, in hockey skates, for hockey situations. She has coached for more than 20 years, with skaters from house league to elite.

That background is the basis of The Sawkins Hybrid Method, which organizes the work into four areas:

• Edges & Balance — inside and outside edge command on both feet, forward and backward, which is what makes every turn and crossover after it possible
• Explosive Power — first-step quickness and acceleration out of stops and turns
• Agility & Footwork — transitions, pivots, and changes of direction on both sides
• Body Control — posture, stability, and staying balanced through contact and traffic

How sessions run: private (one coach to one skater), semi-private (one coach to two or three), and small groups (one coach to five). Players skate in their own hockey skates and hockey gear, because this is hockey skating and not figure skating. Skaters here run from about age six through college and adult professional, with most in the competitive 8 to 18 range.

Practical details: group packages run in seasonal blocks — Fall (September 7 to November 1, eight weeks), Winter 1 (November 2 to December 20, seven weeks), Winter 2 (January 4 to March 14, ten weeks), March Break (March 15 to 19), and Spring Training, with a holiday break from December 20 to January 3. Packages are group sessions only. Private and semi-private sessions are arranged directly by email at sawkinseliteskating@gmail.com. Sessions run at various rinks across the GTA rather than one fixed location, and the rink is confirmed when you book, along with makeup and cancellation terms.

Skating work will not make a player something they are not. What it aims to do is reduce the mechanical limits on what your child can already do, so that their stride is less likely to get in the way of the rest of their game. No skating program can promise a roster spot or any particular outcome at a tryout.

What power skating actually is, and how to tell whether your player needs it →

7. The Mental Side, and the Drive Home

A tryout is an audition, and most kids know it. Nerves are normal and are not a problem to be solved; they are a sign the player cares. What matters is what they do with them.

Give them something concrete to focus on. "Play well" is unhelpful. "First to the puck on your first shift" and "head up through the neutral zone" are things a player can actually execute. One or two focus points per session, no more.

Separate effort from outcome. A player controls how hard they skate, how quickly they get to the line, and whether they listen when a coach speaks. They do not control who else showed up, what position an organization is short at, or what a particular evaluator is looking for that year. Define a good tryout by the things they control, and mean it.

Coachability shows. Being first in line for drills, listening without needing instructions repeated, adjusting after feedback, and body language on the bench are the kinds of things anyone running a session tends to pick up on. Some of this is temperament, but a lot of it can simply be talked about beforehand.

The drive home matters more than the drive there. In our experience it is one of the easiest things for a well-meaning parent to get wrong. After a session, resist the technical debrief. Ask what they enjoyed. Let them talk if they want to, and be quiet if they do not. A child who dreads the post-tryout car ride can carry that onto the ice the next day.

Do not compare out loud. Comments about other kids, other families, or what someone's older sibling did teach a player to measure themselves against the wrong thing.

8. The Week Of: What To Do and What Not To Do

The final week is about protecting the work, not adding to it.

Do:

• Keep skating, but keep it light. Enough to keep the feel of the blade, not enough to arrive flat.
• Get the sharpening done early enough that they skate on it once before it counts.
• Check gear the week before: laces, tape, anything worn out.
• Arrive with real time to spare, and warm up the same way every session so the routine itself becomes calming.
• Keep their normal routine in every respect. Familiar beats optimal.
• Encourage them to be visible on the first shift: first in line, first to the puck, moving their feet from the opening whistle.

Do not:

• Overhaul technique. A correction introduced in the final week is likely to be only half-learned, and in our experience half-learned mechanics tend to break down under pressure.
• Break in new skates, or change to an unfamiliar sharpening.
• Add extra sessions in a panic. Fatigue tends to show up in exactly the things that are most visible on the ice: knee bend, posture, first-step quickness.
• Deliver a long list of instructions in the parking lot.
• Debrief each session in detail between sessions. Short, forward-looking, done.

9. Common Mistakes, and What to Do If They Do Not Make It

The mistakes we see most often, roughly in the order we would prioritize fixing them:

• Starting too late and expecting a rebuild. Technical change is slow. Cramming produces anxiety, not stride mechanics.
• Training only the strong side. It feels productive because everything looks good. It is one of the easier gaps to spot from the bench.
• Confusing conditioning with skating skill. A fitter player who skates inefficiently is still skating inefficiently; they just get there tired. Conditioning matters, and it is a different discipline with different specialists. It is not a substitute for mechanics.
• New equipment at the worst possible time. Boots, blades, and sharpening all change how a player feels on the ice.
• Over-scheduling. More ice is not always better ice. Quality of attention beats quantity of hours, and players who arrive drained rarely skate their best.
• Chasing a level instead of building a player. Levels sort themselves out over years. Skill compounds.

If they do not make it: it happens to good players every single year, for reasons that often have nothing to do with them, such as numbers at a position, returning players, or what an organization needs that season. It is genuinely disappointing, and pretending otherwise is not respectful to a kid who worked for it.

What helps is a short, honest conversation once the sting has faded: what did they feel good about, and what one or two things do they want to be better at by next year? Then get back to work with a longer runway than last time. Development is not linear and it is not a single audition. We have seen plenty of players take a real step forward in the year after a tryout that did not go their way.