And now for something completely different...

I've been feeling great about the progress I've been making with my coach; I can see a big difference in games, which is really encouraging. I guess I was getting a little too satisfied with myself because now we've moved on to a few things that have me feeling like I'm back at square one. As mentioned in an earlier post, I asked him if we could work on handling the puck, and we started a little bit of that last week- and it was quite humbling. That net is a lot farther away from the boards than it seems! This week he added tracking the puck behind the net, which I think I do a fairly good job of in games, but for some reason this morning I kept losing it in one particular spot. When you're wearing glasses, using your peripheral vision isn't really much of an option, especially when your vision is as bad as mine. So I have to work on becoming an owl so I can turn my head around a little farther.

One thing I felt good about though, was a technique used when the puck is being carried from behind the goal line out, towards the circles or for a wrap attempt. He had me positioned on the post and was sort of talking to himself saying "should we do this now? eh, what the heck, let's try it", and I knew exactly what he was thinking and put my far pad down (technically this is called a "VH position" though I have no idea why). I was happy to show that I knew a little bit of where he was going, and he just adjusted my stance in that position a little, to close a few holes.

He also tried to do a drill where he lobbed the puck at me, with the intent of me catching it in my glove, and then placing it down beside the net and setting it up for an imaginary defenseman. The key to this drill is actually catching it in my glove. Since I never played many sports growing up, and certainly not baseball/softball, I don't have any coordination whatsoever in that department. Add to that the fact that I tend to turn my wrist back as the puck makes contact with the glove (if it does at all), which sends it right into the net, and you have a bit of a disaster on your hands. This at least I can work on at home, with a tennis ball drill that will improve my hand-eye coordination. But as he observed toward the end of the lesson "I guess we have to work on that glove hand a bit". Yeah.... just a bit.

But all that aside, I'm looking forward to tonight's game. After two wins in a row the team is feeling pretty good and I hope we can carry some of that energy forward into our third contest.