Start with their hands

Picture the first few minutes of a session with a young squad. The balls come out, the sticks come up, and within seconds you can see who has been taught how to hold the thing and who is fighting it. One player carries the ball glued to their feet, head down, stick choking the handle. Another drifts past two cones with the ball out in front, head up, already looking for the next pass. The difference is rarely talent. It is almost always the foundations: how they grip, what the left hand is doing, and whether they can carry the ball into space without losing sight of the game.

These are the unglamorous skills. Nobody films a highlight reel of a good grip. But every receive, every elimination, every clean pass is built on top of them, and when they are missing the cracks show up the moment the pressure arrives half a second early. This piece pulls together what some of the sharpest coaches on The Hockey Site have said about grip, the left hand and ball carrying, and turns it into something you can run on a Tuesday night.

The good news for anyone working with youth and junior players is that none of this needs separate sessions for separate abilities. One theme, taught well, gives your whole group somewhere to stand.

If you only fix one thing this season with a young group, make it the grip. It is the quiet multiplier behind everything else. As Adam Falla puts it, "If we can get the hands in the right position for different techniques, then we're off to a really good start in creating good hockey fundamentals." That is the whole argument in one sentence. The hands are not a detail you get to later, they are the thing that makes everything later possible.

And of the two hands, the one that does the steering is the left. Simon Letchford is blunt about it: "If we grip the stick correctly in our left hand, then I think we can execute all of our skills far better and more easily than if we hold the stick the wrong way." Notice the phrase "more easily". This is not about making players work harder. A good left-hand grip makes the same skill cost less effort, which matters enormously when you are asking a young player to think about several things at once.

There is a deeper reason to get this right while players are young. The grooves we lay down early are the ones that last. A habit, good or bad, is far easier to build than it is to break, and the years when players are youngest are exactly when technical patterns wire in fastest. Time spent on a clean grip now is the cheapest investment you will ever make, because it saves you from un-teaching a messy one for the next five seasons. The trick when something is already wrong is not to attack the old habit head on but to build the correct one beside it and keep reaching for it until it takes over.

Once the hands are right, the next foundation is distance: how far the ball lives from the feet. Young players instinctively keep it close, because close feels safe. But close also means blind. Letchford makes the link directly: "the further away we get the ball from our feet, the easier our vision becomes." The ball out in front is not showing off, it is how a player sees the field.

This is where the right hand earns its place. When a player wants to carry, the grip changes. Ross Gilham-Jones describes it cleanly: "When you're ball carrying, bring that right hand up the stick so you can extend your arms further away and have the ball further out. That will increase your vision and your gameplay significantly." Same player, same stick, a different grip for a different job. That is the lesson worth building into juniors early, that the grip is not one fixed thing but adjusts to what they are trying to do.

Here is the mindset shift that separates a tidy trainer from a real player. Receiving is not stopping the ball. Siegfried Aikman is emphatic that in the modern game, "stopping doesn't happen in modern hockey. The only place ... that you stop the ball, that's actually at the penalty corner on top D." Everything else is a receive, and as he frames it, "Receiving is, uh, preparing your next action."

For a young player that idea can feel abstract, so it helps to make it physical. Ross Gilham-Jones offers a simple cue for the receiving position: "By dropping it down, it forces you to get lower and it just gives you much more control on the stick." Lower body, hands ready, ball met out in front rather than trapped at the feet.

The article On Ball Principles puts the standard plainly: a first touch "must buy time, buy space, or buy protection. If it buys nothing, it is 'control' that still loses possession a second later." That is a brilliant yardstick to give juniors. After every receive, ask them what their touch just bought.

And when the foundations are solid, receiving can do more than survive contact, it can beat it. Tsoanelo Pholo builds a whole idea on this: "How am I moving to receive in a way that I am already beyond my defender?" His grip detail ties the whole topic together: "your grip is more hands apart. Split grip ... nice and low, protect the ball. But then once I want to go forward at pace, that right hand must come up on my stick so that the first touch can go straight into space." Grip, left hand and carrying, all in one motion.

Carrying the ball is a foundation in its own right, not just a way of getting from A to B. Andrew Wilson is clear that "running with the ball is ... an important part of ... hockey." But he is equally clear that the aim is not raw speed. Talking about a naturally quick athlete, he says, "I would first teach her to slow down because knowing how to use your speed and when to use your speed will be her superpower." For junior players who can already run fast, that is a gift of a coaching line.

What he is protecting against is the robot, the player who only knows one gear. "We don't want players who are machines. We want players who are able to read in split seconds." A good carry is a thinking carry: ball out in front thanks to that right hand sliding up, head up because the ball is no longer under the nose, decisions available because vision is open.

Pholo adds the detail that makes carrying repeatable under pressure, the feet. "Tiny steps? Not even small steps." And the non-negotiable: "your first touch must be past your feet." Small adjusting steps, ball pushed out front, eyes up. That is a carry that survives a defender.

Both of these are deliberately built around the same idea: fundamentals are the trunk that everything else grows from, so it pays to groove them before you add the branches. Two principles sit underneath the design. First, pitch the challenge just beyond what players can already do, hard enough that they make mistakes and have to fix them, because the comfortable rep that never fails is also the rep that never teaches. Second, the moment a player gets it, move the goalposts. A quick "good, now do it under a bit of pressure" the instant they succeed keeps them in productive struggle rather than coasting.

Progress it by asking for an open body shape, so the receiver is half-turned and can already see where they want to play. Then add gentle pressure, a feeder stepping in slowly after the pass, so the receive has to mean something. As Pholo reminds us, "It's really difficult to eliminate with a receive when you are ... static," so keep them moving onto the ball.

What to look for: a calm left hand, the ball met out in front, and a touch that clearly buys time, space or protection. Ask the players afterwards what that touch bought them. If they can answer, the principle is landing.

Build it up by adding a passive defender, then a live one, and by changing direction partway so players have to use those tiny adjusting steps to keep the ball out front while turning. Borrow Wilson's idea and reward the player who slows down to read the picture before accelerating, not just the quickest one.

What to look for: the right hand high on the handle, the ball travelling ahead of the player, and eyes scanning rather than fixed on the ball. The outcome you want is a carry that beats pressure because the player saw it coming. Resist the urge to narrate every fault. Let players work out their own fix first, prompted by a short question rather than a long instruction, because the correction a player generates for themselves sticks far better than the one you hand them.