At what age can a player start drag flicking?

Separate the movement from the specialism. Ross Gilham-Jones suggests young players start by picking the ball up from behind them and drag-pushing it. Justin Reid-Ross puts specialising as a corner option at around the end of 14, 15 or into 16, and offers that as his own opinion, reasoning about being a credible threat rather than about injury. No coach in The Hockey Site archive names an age at which drag flicking becomes safe.

How do I stop a young drag flicker hurting their back?

Fix the technique rather than capping the reps. John Goldberg's rule is that the ball must roll along the stick, because otherwise the player compensates with the shoulder or wrist. He wants players sitting low through the hips rather than bending the back, and treats a left foot finishing behind the right, or closed on the last step, as reasons to stop. Phil Moreland found that tight hips and poor thoracic rotation push the load into the lumbar spine.

How many drag flicks should a player do in a session?

No coach on the site gives a session cap, and John Goldberg explicitly declines to when asked, saying it depends from athlete to athlete. His rule is about fatigue rather than volume: stop when the player starts to feel something or gets tired, and after a physical session do three, four or five rather than fifty. If a player reports pain, treat it as a medical question and send them to a physio.

How do I keep juniors engaged without lowering my standards?

Tin Matkovic's formula is equal care, different demands. Everybody gets the same attention and the same coaching point, but what you ask of each player differs, so the strongest are still stretched and the newest can see a way to catch up. He runs one drill across several ability groups rather than splitting the squad, and offers extra work rather than assigning it. Standards can also be held in things unrelated to hockey, like Jon Bleby's no phones at team meals.

Should I deselect young players who are not keeping up?

Mark Bateman of England under 18s would rather make errors including players than excluding them, because young players often do not yet know what they do not know. He describes a pathway where players can come in and out repeatedly. Where deselection is unavoidable, Tin Matkovic's rule is to make sure the player still has a comparable environment to grow in afterwards. David Passmore adds that junior results rarely predict where a player ends up.

When do clubs lose junior hockey players?

Fede Tanuscio names the move from the small pitch to the full pitch as the point where clubs lose most children, though he offers it as his own observation rather than as data. His answer is patience with a realistic timescale, three to six months for players to stop being overwhelmed by the space, and coaching by question rather than correction. No coach in The Hockey Site archive quotes a dropout statistic, and the figures that circulate elsewhere are rarely sourced.

juniors Archives - The Hockey Site

We’ve got no drag flicker. How do I develop one safely?

Quick answer. Separate learning the movement from specialising in it. Picking the ball up behind you and drag-pushing it is something young players can start early. Building a penalty corner weapon is a job for around fifteen or sixteen, and the coaches here give that as opinion rather than as a rule. On the back, the message is consistent: the load lands on the spine when the technique makes it, so fix the faults rather than capping the reps. Let the ball roll along the stick, sit low through the hips instead of bending the back, and never flick when the player is tired, because that is when the compensations start. And be honest about what nobody on this site will tell you, which is a safe number of flicks per session.

That is the short version. Here is what the coaches actually say, and where they stop.

The load goes to the back when the body stops sharing it. John Goldberg puts the mechanism plainly in Developing Elite Drag Flickers: “if you don’t let the ball roll on your stick, you’re going to have to compensate too much with, for example, your shoulder or your wrist. And it’s just not good. The body is not really made for that, so we need to use as much body parts as we can.” That is the whole safety argument in one sentence. A flick that recruits the legs, the hips and the trunk asks less of any single joint than one that does not.

Sit lower, and shorten the last step. Goldberg’s own adjustment is worth trying before anything else: “by making this step a little bit shorter, but by getting more, sitting down, so still getting so low, the advantage of that is that you use your right foot and your right leg a little bit more. So it, one, protects your body, and two, gives you extra balance slash explosivity.” For juniors he goes further, and it is about hips rather than spine: “especially for the kids, number one is really flexibility, and having that part really lean, and you need to be able to go down without using too much of your back.”

The mechanism, from a strength coach’s side. Phil Moreland’s pre-season masterclass gives the only explicit lumbar-spine statement in the archive, and it came from movement screening rather than theory: “we noticed really tight hips. They had poor thoracic rotation and extension, and that’s really important particularly for our drag flickers. If our drag flickers can’t get good thoracic rotation and can’t get good thoracic extension, then they’re going to put a lot more pressure through their lumbar spine and through their lower back.” If your flicker is stiff through the upper back and hips, the flick will find the give somewhere, and it will be lower down.

Two faults Goldberg treats as stop signs. The first is a left foot that finishes behind the right: “if you see a kid where his left foot ends up here at the back, you need to stop.” The second is a closed left foot on the last step: “if their left foot at the last step is completely closed, the rotation is not going to be possible, and that’s an absolute no go, and that is dangerous.” Both are about rotation. Take the rotation away and something else has to twist.

Fatigue is the risk, not the repetition. Asked directly whether he caps the number of flicks per session, Goldberg declines to give a number and gives a rule instead: “it depends from athlete to athlete”, then “the more you can do, the better, but not when you’re fatigued, then it becomes a bit dangerous”, and “when they start to feel something or get fatigued, for me, that’s the alarm to say watch out”. His only figure is a ceiling for a tired player, not a session cap: after a physical session, “do three, four, or five. But don’t, on that moment, when you’re tired and you’re hurt, don’t go for 50 flicks.”

Learning it early is not the same as specialising early. Justin Reid-Ross draws that line clearly in his drag flick session, and offers it as his own view rather than as guidance: “I don’t think it makes much sense to be a specialist drag flicker at age 13 or 14 even, because I don’t think you have enough power and I don’t think you have enough technique at that stage to be a credible threat at a penalty corner.” His timing is “around the end of 14, 15, going into 16”. Note that his reasoning is about being useful at a corner, not about injury. On starting earlier he is relaxed, as long as it is the movement rather than the weapon: “it’s literally learning the technique of carrying the ball on your stick and then making the push pass.”

A sensible first version for young players. Ross Gilham-Jones of Leap Hockey suggests the same staged approach from the grip side in Essential Grip Skills: “teaching the drag flick to the younger age group, just getting them to pick the ball up from behind them to start with, and drag pushing it, is a great way to start.” Adam Falla adds why the grip needs its own attention: the drag flick grip “is quite unique in the game. It’s not really a grip that’s repeated in many other skills.”

What the strength coach actually watches, and it is not the back. Matthew Eyles was asked directly about specialist positions in Injury Reduction Training Methods, and his answer is groin and hip: “we tend to monitor the groin strength of the drag flickers a little bit closer.” He adds rotational work in the gym, extra hip and groin work, and mobility rather than only strengthening. Across a long session on injury reduction he never raises the lower back for flickers at all, which is worth knowing when you read confident claims about drag flicking and backs.

Train it high, because bad technique cannot hide there. Goldberg uses height as a diagnostic rather than a target: “training high is actually really good because it gives you a lot of info on your technique, and you can’t flick good high if your technique is not good, but you can flick good low if your technique is not perfect.”

Then make it a contest. His session shape is simple and easy to copy: “what I like to do is starting only with technique, then put technique and competitive together, and then finish only with competitive.” Reid-Ross’s version of the volume question is about habit rather than load: “ten minutes before training, ten minutes after training, or flicking ten balls, you’re really then taking a step to doing more than somebody else.”

Where this page stops, deliberately. Two things are worth saying plainly. First, nobody in our archive names an age at which drag flicking becomes safe. Reid-Ross’s numbers are about being a useful corner option, and the one reference to puberty is Goldberg relaying a mentor’s opinion. Second, nobody gives a safe number of flicks. If a coach hands you either figure with confidence, ask where it came from. And when a player reports pain, treat that as a medical question rather than a technique question. Eyles’s answer when asked about an injury was the right one: “find a physio. That’s my first piece of advice.”

None of this is a programme. What these coaches give you is a way of watching a young flicker, so you can tell whether the movement is sharing the load or dumping it in one place. Watch the sessions in full, take what fits, and stop the session when the technique goes rather than when the count runs out.

Go more in depth here

John Goldberg

Developing Elite Drag Flickers

Watch on demand

Justin Reid-Ross

Coaching points for the drag flick

Watch on demand

Adam Falla and Ross Gilham-Jones

Essential Grip Skills

Watch on demand

More coaching questions: How do I coach the hit so players get power without lifting or fouling?, How do I teach the Indian dribble properly in field hockey?, How often should my players train before I’m overcooking them?, What is the best field hockey warm-up to get game-ready and cut injuries?. All of them are in Field Hockey Coaching Questions.

The experts mentioned in this article

John GoldbergBelgian coach at Beerschot in the Honour Division and on the coaching staff for the Belgian women.

Matthew EylesS&C expert from Australia who worked for Hockey India and the Dutch national teams.

Join us for more on this

Free coaching ideas from the world’s best, straight to your inbox.

Subscribe for free

Want the full on demand library?

See all of our on-demand content in full.

Get a Coach subscription

How do I keep juniors coming back without letting the standards slide?

Quick answer. The choice between keeping them and pushing them is mostly a false one. The coaches here hold the standard in the demands they make of each player, not in who gets to stay: equal care, different demands. They keep the door open in both directions rather than deselecting, they bias towards including a player and being wrong rather than excluding one, and they cap how much they ask of a young group at any one time so the standard is reachable. And they watch the moments where clubs actually lose children, which is less about a hard session and more about a transition nobody prepared them for.

That is the short version. Here is what the coaches say.

The formula that solves the question. Tin Matkovic puts it in four words in Balancing Skill Gaps: “equal care, different demands is also really important. So equal care is that we want to make sure that everybody feels special in the trainings, and different demands is that we touch the best player so that they can still improve, and we can touch the new players so that they can still find a glimpse of catching up for the level that we are.” The standard does not drop. It just stops being the same standard for everyone in the room.

How that looks in a session. Matkovic runs one drill across four ability groups rather than splitting the squad: “on the left side, they will do exactly the same drill, but maybe the intensity will not be that good”, and the coaching point stays the same for all of them. “You created one drill that fits for four groups.” Where he does want to stretch the strongest, he offers rather than assigns: “you can find this additional stuff that you would like to do with groups and then offer it only to the players that are able to do it, or maybe are super motivated to do it.” He is realistic about who takes it up: “maybe some people are just committed to two times a week and they will not feel that this third additional training is for them.”

Bias towards including and being wrong. Mark Bateman, who coaches England’s under 18s, gives the sharpest line on this: “we’d rather include people and make errors including them than make errors excluding them.” His reasoning is about what a young player can even know about themselves yet: “we can’t be deselecting people at our age because at times they don’t know what they don’t know. So it’s about trying to help them understand that, so they’ve got a better self-awareness of it.”

Make the door swing both ways. Bateman describes the change in the England pathway as exactly that: “you can come in, you can come out, you can come in, you can come out, as opposed to maybe what it might have been in previous years”, along with an open door for players with no access to a talent academy. A player who knows they can come back is a very different proposition from one who has been told no.

When you do have to deselect, protect what happens next. Matkovic’s rule is about the environment rather than the conversation: “if it’s a permanent selection, then I suggest that you make sure that the individual that is not selected has the same, or basically a little bit less, but still the same environment to grow after he’s been put out of the selection.” He also points out that how hard this lands is cultural: some children have been selected and deselected all the way through, and for others “it’s a drama process”.

Junior results tell you almost nothing anyway. David Passmore makes the case in A research based approach to talent development: “when kids are under 8, under 10, under 12, under 14, their success actually will rarely have a direct term effect on where they end up.” He goes further, and argues the bumps are part of it: “as much as we want kids to progress nice and smoothly up a hill, the reality is not only are there obstacles that they face, deselection, not getting the right support, not getting the right coaching, being injured. Actually what’s proven is that we need to put those bumps in the road, we need to give them a rocky pathway and challenges as coaches, because down the line that’s going to make them better players.”

The line that joins enjoyment to staying. Passmore’s version of the parents’ conversation is the clearest statement of the whole idea: “don’t judge me on where you are now, judge me on where your kids end up. Do they enjoy hockey enough? If they’re going to be good, they’re more likely to stay in it, and then do they go on to play representative when they’re older?” That is not a soft position. Enjoyment is the mechanism by which anybody is still there to get good.

Hold the standard somewhere cheap. Jon Bleby, who runs GB’s elite development programme, gives an example that costs nothing and is not about hockey at all: “we don’t have any phones when we’re having team meals, and even just that one simple little standard, it just makes such an incredible difference.” Standards do not have to be enforced through selection.

Cap what you ask for. Fede Tanuscio puts a hard limit on how much a young team can carry in How to transfer key hockey principles when kids switch to full pitches: “we cannot have, from under 9, 20 principles. That’s not good.” His working number for under 12 is two principles with the ball and two without, adding roughly two more per age band. A standard nobody can hold in their head is not a standard, it is noise.

And watch the transition, because that is where they go. Tanuscio names the moment, and hedges it honestly as his own observation: “it’s also where they lost, I don’t know if I’m wrong, but this was where they lose more kids, the transition from the small pitch to the big pitch.” His advice is patience with a real timescale attached, three to six months before players stop being lost in the space, and questions rather than corrections: “always asking questions. And the kids, they always said, yeah, because I see that one free. Okay, but do you think it’s dangerous, that?”

Getting a switched-off child back. Lisa Letchford has the most immediately usable tactic on this page, from Basic skills through Small Sided Games: “every kid wants to impress and wants to feel like you’re watching and listening. I would say the next time that you see something even small positive in what they’re trying to do, jump on it immediately and recognise it. And I reckon you’ll get them listening the next time that they come in.” She also defends mixed ability on developmental grounds up to about under 14, and keeps sessions to “40 minutes to an hour”, with about twenty minutes as the ceiling on any one game.

Two honest limits on this page. First, nobody on this site quotes a dropout statistic, and the numbers that circulate about children leaving sport are rarely sourced, so we are not going to repeat one. Second, and more interesting, none of these coaches has treated retention as a separate problem from enjoyment. They assert the link and move on. If your club is losing children at a particular age, you are probably ahead of the published thinking and the useful data is your own registration list.

None of this is a policy. What these coaches give you is a way of holding a line without using selection to do it, and a few places to look when children stop coming. Watch the sessions in full, take what fits your club, and check who did not come back after the pitch got bigger.