The Minnesota Steel Offensive/Defensive training program focuses heavily on individual positional skill development.

Offensive Skill Development: Creating Time and Space in both tight and large areas, footwork, reading how the goalie is playing in different situations and counters, raising the puck quickly in tight to the goal, one-timers, quickly release shots, changing angle of shot, being deceptive, reading defenders and finding soft spots to generate a high scoring opportunity, catching pucks in skates and off the walls, counter hit/bump, how to protect, and more!

Defensive Skill Development: Walking the blue line, deception to get to high scoring areas, where they want to shoot from, always shooting with the intention of the puck in the back of the net, gap control, taking away time and space, dictating opposing players decision, getting stick-on-stick and body-on-body, finish hits/bumps, reading players eyes and body, and more!

Both Groups: Teaching to play with explosive and speed, scanning the ice to make quick decisions and to lead to higher success rates, how to generate high scoring opportunities, creating and taking away time and space, catching passes in skates, off the wall, behind, and on tape.

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 their muscle memory. 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.