Tracking the Puck Through Traffic: Seeing What You Need to See

By Eldon 'Pokey' Reddick | Hockey Horizons Mentor & Former NHL Goaltender

If there is one technical skill that I believe is the most undercoached at the junior and youth levels, it's tracking — the ability to follow the puck continuously through traffic, screens, and chaos and keep your eyes on it right to the moment of contact. Watch any group of young goalies and you'll see the same problem: they lose the puck behind a screen, their eyes drift to the shooter's body or the traffic in front, and when the puck emerges they're guessing. Guessing leads to goals.

Great tracking is not about having better eyesight than everyone else. It's about where you train your focus. Your eyes should be on the puck — not the shooter's shoulders, not the stick blade, not the player standing in front of you. The puck. Always the puck. When a screen moves in front of you, your job is to find the puck around the screen, through the screen, or in the gap that opens when the screen moves. This requires anticipation, patience, and — again — trained habit.

I tell goalies to think of their eyes as a tracking system. You're locked onto the puck the way a radar locks onto a target. Players move in front of you, traffic gets heavy, chaos happens — and your eyes stay on the puck through all of it. When you lose it temporarily behind a screen, you're already calculating where it's going to emerge based on the angle and the play developing in front of you.

Screen Practice Is Essential

Ask your coach to run screen situations in practice. Specifically, set up drills where a player stands directly in your line of sight while shots come from various angles. Work on finding the puck around the screen. Work on your footwork adjustments when you lose the sight line temporarily. This is a situation that happens dozens of times in every competitive game — you need to practice it, not just experience it.

At Hockey Horizons, we understand that goaltending is its own world — technically, mentally, and strategically. Pokey Reddick works directly with goaltenders and their families to navigate development, team selection, and the junior and college recruiting process. If you're serious about your goalie's future, reach out to us at hockeyhorizons.com.

For guidance on the complete development picture, visit us at hockeyhorizons.com.