How To Hockey Pass

Hi. My name is Adam Larkin. I'm the East London Hockey Club First Team Captain.

I've been playing hockey for 12 years. Say, in this video, we're going to do a quick demonstration on the different methods of passing a hockey ball, and the first method being the safest method is a push pass. So, what we'll do there, we'll have the ball on our front foot with our weight on our shoulder, hands far apart and we'll imagine dragging the ball along the turf and push it to our opposite member.

Say, we'll get the ball and we'll push it along the floor to our opposite man and in terms of directing the pass, you see that the key is that we're following with our elbow in the direction we want the ball to go. Say, we'll get the ball and push forward and we'll push it directly to our opposite member. And the second method of passing the ball, which is a harder method of passing but still accurate, is to slap the ball on the floor.

So the idea here is to get yourself low, get your weight forward and you use a sweeping motion to sweep the ball along the floor. Say, we'll aim to get the ball in the front of our foot and we'll just go on the floor and we'll just sweep along the turf. And so the key there is having your hands slightly closer together at the hockey stick and using the momentum of your wrists to catch the ball in a sweeping action, so sweep it along the floor.

And the third method of passing the ball which is for long distance passers is to hit the ball. It's generally less accurate but it's also going to get there much much faster. Say, again you get your weight over the ball, head down and strike through the ball and head it to the opposite man.

One key thing to talk about is just as the grip, say, when we're doing a pushing motion, we'll have our hands far apart and with the base lining down the inside edge of our stick and we are able to then use our elbow to push the ball through. And with a slapping motion, it's that time with the grip to have our hands much closer together still maintaining the v down the line in the stick and we're then going to use our hands together and push through using more of your right hand than your left hand to get the force. In terms of hitting the ball, you have your hands very close together, and you tend to have them sort of not so much pointing straight down the stick but kind of together almost as in like a kind of like you're holding more of like a baseball type bat, and the key there is getting your weight over the ball so it's hitting down through the ball and keeping your weight forward.

And so that's the basis of passing, the three methods - a push, a slap or a hit. .