The Minnesota Steel Skills training program is great for advanced mite/U8 players, squirt/U10, and peewee/U12 age players. This program focuses on the following aspects: Skating mechanics, overspeed training, explosive starts, incorporating deception with stickhandling, receiving passes on forehand, backhand, in skates, and behind the player, passing, and different types of shots. 

The Minnesota Steel coaching staff ensures each player is performing each skill with proper biomechanics to maximize the athlete’s development. Practices are designed to provide deep practice to hardwire skills into our young athletes’ brains.

Deep practice is high quality repetitions to develop the proper neurological systems (muscle memory) to master each skill. It is imperative that players get high repetitions, but more importantly, they need to be done with the correct form and biomechanics. Deep practice breaks skills up into small chunks, starting off slow then progressively getting faster. Developing these skills is achieved by the following approach:

1. Provide players with the Repetition and Time needed to develop muscle memory to master a particular skill.
2. Providing an environment for players to make mistakes.
3. Coaches providing feedback and showing players how to fix mistakes.

Minnesota Steel Formula for athlete development:

Quality Repetitions + Making Mistakes + Fixing Mistake = Deep Practice = Perfection

Minnesota Steel takes this development approach with all of our programs. By incorporating this method into our program, we are able to teach our athletes how to properly train on their own. We’re not just going through the motions. It is performing a skill, stopping when we make a mistake, assessing what we did wrong and how we can correct the mistake. As part of the Future Prospect program, players will have access to our off-ice curriculum.