We all know that good transition skating is the key to being able to defend 1v1s effectively. If you can’t pivot forwards to backwards efficiently, you are going to struggle in 1v1 situations and get beat easily.

When we start to work on these forward-to-backward pivots on the ice, sometimes players incorrectly refer to them as “D drills”. As you’ll see from the videos below, what first starts as simple forward-to-backwards pivots with the puck on your stick soon progresses to 1v1 drills with both attacker and defender using these pivots and also works well in quick release shooting drills.

Defending & Attacking 1v1s Using Transition Skating:

Let’s start with a simple transition skating drill with pucks.
NOTE: We spent time at each of the 3 previous practices working on F to B pivots without and with the puck so this is a progression for this team.

As you can see, all players are heads up using F-to-B transitions while facing the goalie’s end. In this drill, players are numbered 1-4 so that they don’t shoot all at the same time on the whistle.

After that simple warm-up drill, we progressed into 1v1 Transition Skating drill:

Players alternate between defending and attacking so that they all continue to work on transition skating with & without the puck. The attacker must do 1, 2 or 3 forward-to-backwards transitions before attacking the net. The defender must react and close the gap and try to deny shots on net. We would progress to giving the defenders sticks. We also do another progression where the attacking players are allowed to tight turn back up ice as well.

Here is one more clip of the same drill – which shows one of our committed NCAA D defending the 1v1. You can quickly see her superior ability to pivot effectively in this type of 1v1 situation:

This transition skating isn’t just used for defending 1v1s or creating separation between you and the defender in the offensive zone. The videos below show how these forward-to-backward transitions are used by both forwards and Ds to create time and space for quick release shots in the offensive zone.

Quick Release Shooting & Transition Skating:

In this video, players must complete 1 forward-to-backward transition before receiving the puck to get off a quick release shot.

You can see how this transition skating would help players to gain space to shoot in the offensive zone.

In the video below, players must first retrieve a puck before passing to one of the outlets. The shooter then transition skates into the spot that they want to receive the puck in to get off their preferred quick release shot.

In this drill, I tell the Ds to stay up a bit higher to receive the puck to mimic getting shots off from above the top of the circle while forwards are allowed to jump in off the backdoor or anywhere that they prefer to receive the puck. We would progress this drill by adding cones as defenders and then teammates as defenders. We could also include goalies in all these shooting drills. However, goalies are not necessary as the priority (at least at this stage) is the proper skating and shooting technique. We would progress to focusing more on accuracy and strategic shooting.

So as you can see from these drill samples, these forwards-to-backwards transitions aren’t just for Ds and are a critical part of attacking, defending and goal scoring.