My kids loved British Bulldog and Asteroids. Do British Bulldog with pucks too, where the bulldog has to knock the puck off their sticks.
Other favorites:
Obstacle courses. Especially ones where they have to superman slide under a stick.
Freeze tag. A buddy has to skate a tight circle around you to unfreeze you. I always thought they'd be sick of freeze tag, but they loved it. There was also a variation of tag that I never got to try - pair them off and have one chase the other in a limited space, blow the whistle and then the chaser switches to chasee - good for learning to change directions fast.
Also, any drill becomes funner if you make it a race.
Thanks Beth. We do all of those as well.
For Freeze Tag we used to make the kids skate/crawl under the frozen players legs in order to unfreeze them.
For the older boys, we did a stick-handling drill where all the skaters were in an offensive zone. The players all started with pucks around the parameter. One coach would stand in the middle. On the coaches mark, the kids would begin skating between the blueline and goalline.
If the coach managed to steal a puck and skate it out of the zone, that player now became a 'stealer'. You did this until there was only one kid left.
My problem is, I'm trying to find fun drills where the kids can learn their cuts, stops, turns, etc while still making it somewhat entertaining.
I've seen too many practices where over half is taken up with hard skating drills.
I know that some feel this is necessary and to some degree I can agree.
I just wonder if there's any drills out there that can reinforce skill development but at the same time have a fun slant to it.
I coach baseball too and it's amazing how many great and fun drills can be implemented while still promoting skill development.
Baseball is such a slow sport, but it seems there are way more fun drills that can be used as opposed to hockey.
At times, in hockey, when watching some practices it seems more like an army regiment than a bunch of young kids learning a sport. I'm trying to change that for our team.