Stickhandling

Stick handling in unicycle hockey take most of its  direction from ice hockey and there is loads of great resources around on how to do it. www.howtohockey.com is a favourite.

I am very much a novice on this front and still find (after 3 sessions:)) that the hockey stick still puts be off balance when I try to handle it with my dominate hand at the top. However, today I discovered a few micro-things that seemed to improve my handling.

i) The top hand should be doing 95% of the work so if that arm is not fatiguing then the other hand is probably doing to much work.

ii) Cupping the ball, meaning that the face of the stick is not vertical when its in contact with the ball but instead leans in towards it, seems to be a very solid way to keep the ball from hitting and jumping over the stick. By focusing on cupping it I found that I lost control far far few times.

iii) Cupping is achieved largely through the rolling of the wrist of the hand on the top of the stick. I spent 20 mins just practicing this rolling motion as I pushed the ball from the left to right and back. The mental framing I found useful was to have my lower hand (in my case the left hand) pointing at the ball. There was almost a sense that the lower hand was fixed at a point in space relative to my body and the upper hand was doing all the positioning and exaggerated wrist rolling was responsible for the cupping.


iv) When moving the ball left and right the cupping action results in an action that makes me think of spreading butter on bread using one side of the knife then the the other, back and forth.

v) I tried to minimise the amount that I bent at the hips in order to reach for the ball. In the first instance I tried to recover the ball by letting the stick slip through you lower hands grip (like drawing a pool cue). Only if it was beyond reach did I then lean into it. I think that anything that prevents a chance of balance is a good thing.

The drills I ran through today that seemed to help:

i) Put the unicycle away and just walk around with the ball practicing the lower hand pointing and wrist rolling. Practice with the ball in different places around you. Walk very slowly.
ii) Try different motions of the ball: push it forward and then use the back of the stick to bring it back in, push it from the close on the left to far on the right. Avoid bending at the hips to reach out for the ball. In the first instance use your upper hand to push the stick towards the ball and let the stick slip through your hand as if making a shot with a pool cue.
iii) Increase these speed slightly to a brisk walk and then work up to a job. keep handling the ball in different locations around your body.

The main idea of these drills was to get used to cupping by rolling the wrists and to reach for the ball with the stick slipping through you lower hand (and avoiding leaning forward if possible).

Adding increasing speed, which then starts to feel more like the real action, will require you to adjust how you push and pull the ball because of the net forward speed.

I did these for about a 1/2 hour and then got on the unicycle and tried and there was a notice improvement in the length of time I could keep the ball under control when dribbling is straight lines and fairly big arcs.

I haven't done any work on controlling the ball through sharp turns yet but that is coming up soon.