Daily Archives: August 3, 2009

There has long been rumored to be a correlation or talent-share between lacrosse and hockey. Many youth hockey players take on lacrosse as their off-season sport. Why do those athletes who spend their winters on the ice find themselves spending their summers on the field? I posed this question to Dennis Chighisola, better known as “Coach Chic,” founder of the New England Hockey Institute in Whitman, MA.

“Long ago, Canadian ice hockey players would use lacrosse as a form of cross-training and readying for the winter,” explained Chighisola. Why does the correlation continue to this day? “In my opinion, the conditioning systems (for both sports) seem fairly close.”

Chighisola used an example from his years of coaching hockey to illustrate the correlation between the two sports. “A long-time student of mine considered giving up hockey for lacrosse. I guess he saw his future on the field, rather than on the ice, and he asked if I would help him train.”

Chighisola is known for his thorough off-ice training programs, thus the student’s request. But he had little knowledge of lacrosse beyond watching games here and there. He thus embraced lacrosse to help his student, watching hours and hours of college lacrosse to increase his knowledge of the game.

“Because he was used to handling his hockey stick as a righty shooter, I suggested he hold his lacrosse stick as a lefty while he relaxed around the house,” explained Chighisola. He also helped his student embrace the game more by “putting together a video combining all sorts of fancy stick moves to the theme of Sweet Georgia Brown, ala the Harlem Globetrotters.” Chighisola then gave his student an CD of the same music, and encouraged him to pair his watching of the video with 8 minutes of practicing his own stick handling to the same music.

Later on, “I introduced obstacles to the drilling so that he would have to climb over and under them while still performing his stuck handling exercises,” said Chighisola. The practice of building obstacles to stick handling drills is an exercise Chighisola’s hockey players were more than used to. “This idea of (the student) needing to deal with several physical problems at once was borrowed from my typical hockey stick-handling clinics.”

Replacing the former hockey student’s power skating work was running and sprinting work. “I borrowed various sprint training techniques and the same agility ladder drills my hockey players had been doing,” and replaced his off-ice cross-over footwork exercises with lateral shuffling moves.

With a few tweaks here and there, the now-former hockey player was able to use his normal hockey conditioning to make his transition into a full-time lacrosse player. Chighisola noted that this student continued on to play college lacrosse. “I’ll suggest that his hockey background provided a solid footing in which to start.”

http://www.examiner.com/x-1475-Boston-Lacrosse-Examiner~y2009m8d2-Making-the-switch-how-a-youth-hockey-player-made-the-successful-switch-to-lacrosse