How Skating Guru Jill Plandowski Develops Great Skaters
Power skating coach Jill Plandowski on technical skating, starting skaters off young the right away, and the "freedom of thought" in hockey that only great skating can afford
Power skating coach Jill Plandowski’s job is to break things down, so her skaters can move forward. She works with hockey players ranging from four years old to the professional ranks, though most of her students these days are somewhere in between, including working with teams such as the USHL’s Chicago Steel.
Bonus: she is a past guest of the Hockey IQ Podcast.
Plandowski grew up a competitive figure skater in a family with brothers who played hockey and a dad who coached. She was coaching young figure skaters by age 12 and kept it up through college, where she trained as a physical education teacher. In that role, she was asked to do more and more hockey, so that, as she tells it, “When my own kids came along, everyone looked at me to coach the four-year-olds… A lot of them had played high-level hockey, but they just didn’t feel comfortable with young kids, and I did.”
“I switched my skates to hockey skates full-time when my now-22-year-old was four,” Plandowski reflects. Some of the postures change in the transition from figure skating to hockey. Still, she’d been immersed in the game from an early age, and that, combined with a background in physical education, meant it never felt like a challenge to translate what she knew in one set of skates to a different one.
On Becoming a Great Skating Developer
“I think being a physical education teacher with a strong background in biomechanics, it really helps me unlock some of the puzzles of a player’s stride,” Plandowski explains. “Knowing how the body works, gives me an advantage to help fix issues when they arise…I spend my days thinking about very specific things and coming up with ideas of how to improve a player, and if I’m not making a connection, I can keep digging and keep trying.”
Plandowski has three kids of her own within three years of one another, so her first exposure to coaching hockey skating happened over six years spent working with four and five-year-olds. It proved the perfect entry point into what has become her career. “It was a great way for me to develop my own curriculum because I was in charge of it, so I had to really write it out and design the groups and the content,” she says. “I think that every coach, no matter what level, should start at that level, because you really don’t realize that the mistakes that happen, even in pro, often stem back from something at a young age…You become a better coach by teaching young kids.”
Most coaches may be drawn to the more glamorous work with older, more developed players, but she points out it’s at much younger levels where the most important coaching and development actually happen. Because re-forming habits is even harder than forming them in the first place, Plandowski places a tremendous premium on the technical detail coaches bring to young players as they first enter the sport.
“In an ideal world, we would teach kids correctly, and they would learn from day one. That makes life so much easier if you learn it the first time correctly,” Plandowksi says. “I really feel it’s important we have our best coaches at the youngest levels, coaches who understand skating mechanics and skill development and acquisition of that skill, and how to break things down. And that requires a really good coach. You’d be shocked at the guys who have played at a high level who can just do it. They don’t understand how to break it down from when they learned it from when they were young. So I would suggest having your best coaches at your youngest levels, because it’s the hardest level to coach, and it’s so important to have good demos.”
On Teaching Technical Skating
"There's Not as Many Natural Skaters as You Would Think".
“Some (skaters) you need to manipulate and kinda move them so they can feel it in that proper pattern that you’re trying to fix.”
Fundamentally, the challenge for any skating coach, as Plandowski sees it, is that skating is an unnatural motion for most people but also a practice where there is clearly a proper technique that allows everything else about a player’s game to fall into place.
“Skating, if you think about it, we walk all day with our toes facing front, and that is such a different motion than skating,” she says. “There’s not as many natural skaters as you would think. When little kids start, they walk, and their toes face front, and then they learn, ‘Oh jeez, if I use the whole inside part of my blade and turn my hip and toes, I go faster.’ It’s just a natural progression, and then they learn if you can push all the way through with that toe flick, you tap into that speed. It evolves, but if you have someone who can teach you and make it fun when you’re little—Like my own kids are all nice skaters, and they don’t even remember learning. They’re like, ‘What did you do with us?’ Because it was always fun, and I just got them to move properly without them ever knowing. Skating properly or skating efficiently gives you freedom of thought when you’re playing the game. The skating never comes into your mind…It gives you freedom of thought to make plays that are the best plays. You don’t have to compensate for anything because of deficiencies in your skating.”
To reinforce this point, she offers a recent example: “I had a high-level player come in from the U.S. last spring. He had never learned how to skate fast with the puck on his backhand. And I remember it was shocking. For me, I can skate…with a puck on my backhand, and I have zero puck skills. Because it’s not a puck skill, it’s an arm action, so if my arm action is always correct, the puck is going to stay on my backhand…Your arms are so important for speed and power and using them properly can open your hips and give you speed and a longer stride…So learning the proper mechanics young with a puck, that’s freedom of thought.” When the technique is sound, the result is form that cannot err. Things must be done the right way because that opens up everything else to work properly too.
As Plandowski sums it up, “My job is to analyze and figure out what movement patterns need adjustment, then I need to get them exercises and a plan for when they’re not with me to improve those movement patterns. You don’t want to overwhelm them. Like, I was in a group last week, and I gave each kid a video and screen-shotted it, so you can clearly see, are their eyes are down, are their arms at their side, is their bend at the knee, is the stick crossing the body? So you point out things, just simple things, that need practice when I’m not with them.”
On Edge Training
Plandowski recognizes that for this sort of work to achieve the desired ends with young players, it has to be fun. Part of her pitch to athletes on this sort of work is that mastering these technical skills within training makes the rest of hockey a lot more fun, because of the “freedom of thought” she alluded to above.
She doesn’t use the term “puck-centric skating” herself, but she estimates that she uses pucks for 80-90% of her practices with her u11 groups onward. “Other than stride mechanics or trying to initially learning a different type of skating move, I use a puck for everything, because that’s the game,” she contends. “You skate differently with and without it, so you might as well learn how to make all those adjustments right off the bat, and then you don’t even know any different”
Coach Revak Note: Sculling = Skating without lifting skates off the ice
One of her favorite drills is something she calls her “Edge Chaos” warm-up, and that her kids refer to as a “hidden bag skate.” “Everyone’s got a puck, and I’ll give them maybe half the ice, and we’ll go through six or seven [exercises],” Plandowski explains. “Sculling, sculling to the outside, inside edges, outside edges, shuffling and punching…and you have to keep your head up, you have a puck, and everything’s a shift length so 40 seconds, and then I’m going to switch it up.” It reinforces crucial techniques like staying low and keeping the eyes up and provides a strenuous workout, but it’s also a lot less monotonous than just skating in lines up and down the rink for a few hours.
A Case for the Multi-Sport Athlete
Crucially, though she places a high premium on doing this work properly at a young age, Plandowski doesn’t think that has to come at the expense of playing other sports. Instead, by working a minimum of 10 minutes of skating—stride work, backward skating, edge work, starts, stops—into each minor hockey practice, young players can get the necessary reps in without sacrificing the opportunity to keep their athletic profile diverse.
“I am a physical education teacher, so I believe strongly that kids should play all sports and free play, definitely up until u-15, but it doesn’t mean they have to play on a team,” she points out. It just means play. Go outside and kick a soccer ball. Go swimming. Go to your local gym and sign out a ball for a pick-up game. My kids would just go to the tennis court and play tennis. They’d play tag. They’d play in the woods. Just play, so they can develop all those wide range of skills: hand-eye, agility, balance, strategies and tactics.”
“I love to figure out how to help someone and break things down,” Plandowksi summates, and she knows that often the skills she teaches will be the difference in whether a player can continue adapting to each new level they encounter. The goal is to make these habits of skating so foundational that they become a player’s “factory setting.”
So, even as her client list includes names like Noah Dobson or Drake Batherson, she maintains that the most important coaching happens long before major junior is a consideration, much less the NHL Draft. Instead, skating properly starts with the transition from walking on ice to an actual stride, doing it the right way from the start to open up the freedom of thought that can follow.
Further Reading