Coach Chic’s NetBlocks
I’ve always been lucky to be aided by some truly sincere volunteer assistant coaches. That was so pretty much wherever I coached, but the situation I’m recalling right now involved a very experienced coach, David S, who was returning to help in my Learn-to-skate and Learn-to-play clinics while his young son started up the hockey ladder.
Now, the reason I’m relating this story is because a new member of our Hockey Drills Only Facebook group happened to mention the difficulty in always keeping plenty of pucks available to the players while his drill was in progress. I suspect other coaches have experienced this problem, whereby a drill can even get stalled when all the pucks get buried in the nets.
Okay, so enter my old friend David… I guess he was probably laughing to himself as he watched me scramble to constantly dig pucks out of one net, while other helpers were attempting to do the same at the other net.
Anyway, Dave eventually grabbed a couple of pucks and placed them under the back of the nearby net, and I don’t doubt he gave me a wink as he backed away. My response, “Hmmmmm…”
What happened next was that any of the little kids’ shots that slid along the ice barely made their way under the net and towards the open ice behind the net. And, because another part of my drill called for the kids to circle behind the nets, there ended up being plenty of excess pucks back there for the kids to scoop as they passed by.
Lucky for me, I had a week to think on David’s idea, and to arrive at what I’d hoped to be an even better idea for raising our nets. My first (dumb) attempt was to try some small blocks of wood, but it was no fun worrying about the splitters that resulted in the pucks hitting those things.
A week or two later, I arrived at what eventually resulted in what I called my “NetBlocks” — hey, everything needs a name!
I used to have a manual that was about 4″ thick, and it was loaded with all sorts of “parts” that went to almost anything one could imagine. One of my younger brothers, an inventor of sorts, gave me an old copy, and I used that for countless years and for countless new hockey gadget ideas.
Anyway, what I found to work awesomely were the rubber, wedge-shaped door stops that can be found very inexpensively at almost any hardware store (I’m talking under $2 each).
I lost a few over the first few weeks of carrying them around, using them, and then storing my NewBlocks. So I eventually drilled a hole in each, and then glued in a fairly thick piece of rope. At the end of each rope I affixed a snap that’s usually found on a dog’s collar (at a cost of about $3 each).
Of course, my little gadgets evolved over several seasons, so that I can now save other coaches all the time it took for me to experiment. What each of my NetBlocks eventually amounted to was a) the rubber wedge that raised a net plenty, b) a piece of rope that made it easy to find and handle), and then c) the snap, which made it easy to attach to my skate bag as I traveled and to a net’s strings when it was used on the ice.
Oh, one last thing… Rather than laying those door stoppers flat, or in their usual position, I turned them so that the thinnest part of the wedge — standing upright — faced towards the shooters. In this way, the chances of a puck hitting the wedge head-on were pretty slim (if you’ll pardon the pun).
In closing, some might think this old coach is a little anal when it comes to such things. But I’ll plead guilty, if we’re talking about finding ways to benefit our players, or arriving at ways to help our teaching be more effective.
