Warmup Tick-Tock: Minute-by-Minute Through Michigan’s Pregame Routine
Warmup Tick-Tock: Minute-by-Minute Through Michigan’s Pregame Routine
We walk step-by-step through Michigan’s fourteen-minute warmup routine, before touching on the ways Brandon Naurato drills his team on similar concepts at practice
This piece in one half of a collaboration between Gulo Gulo and Hockey’s Arsenal. Check out the other side of that equation, courtesy of friend of the newsletter Greg Revak.
We are about to walk through the fourteen-minute warmup routine Brandon Naurato has organized for Michigan this season. The videos below are taken from the season-opening series against Lindenwood. For the sake of simplicity, the times listed below are from the Saturday night game (a seven o’clock start), but Friday’s warmup never deviated from that pacing by more than a minute.
6:23: Michigan takes the ice and opens with players circling the zone and shooting freely. Roughly one minute following this same structure is used as a transition between each warmup exercise.
6:24: Michigan divides the team in half to set up a rondo on either side of the ice. Each rondo has four offensive players sharing the puck, with two checkers pursuing it. Unlike a traditional rondo (in which offensive players remain stationary around the perimeter of the ring), Naurato has clearly emphasized that the offensive players without the puck should work on passing through the two checkers in providing a passing option. Freshman defenseman Luca Fantilli is the one Wolverine skater not involved in either of the two rondos; he is warming up Michigan’s goaltenders.
6:26: A circling and shooting reset
6:27: Two lines form at the blue line. Each skater sends a pass to the player at the front of the opposite line, receives a return feed, then skates in for a 1-on-0 look at the goaltender.
6:28: After a full rotation through the two lines, players now exchange a pass with the head of the opposite line before embarking on a 2-on-0 together.
6:30: Circle and shoot to reset
6:31: For the first time in the warmup sequence, forwards and defensemen have different assignments. The team divides itself into five-man units, with each unit retrieving two dump-ins together. On the first rep, the unit looks to attack off the cycle together. On the second, the group breaks the puck out to the blue line before the forwards try their hand at a 3-on-2 rush against the defensemen.
6:33: Circle and shoot to reset
6:34: Senior forward Eric Ciccolini retrieves the pucks that have ended up in the net to set up a shooting umbrella. Each player receives a pass from Ciccolini then takes a shot on either Erik Portillo or backup Noah West. After everyone else takes a turn, Ciccolini leaves his post along the goal line to receive a pass of his own from Adam Fantilli and shoots.
6:36: One last circle and shoot that concludes with a jam play on the night’s backup goaltender Noah West.
6:37: The horn sounds signaling the end of warm up. Michigan’s skaters take their last shots, before captain Nolan Moyle is the last one off the ice.
After the regular season opener against Lindenwood, I asked Naurato to talk me through some of the updates to the warmup routine, which friend of the newsletter Drew Van Drese notes hadn’t previously changed in over a decade.
At first, Naurato joked that the warmup worked to perfection in setting up a first period in which Michigan promptly fell behind by two goals before confirming our suspicion that the new routine has its roots in the Cruyff-Guardiola tradition of possession-based attacking soccer.
“I mean it worked really well tonight,” Naruato quipped. “It kinda comes from soccer…I’m a big Pep Guardiola fan... It’s just we need to warm up our brain, we need to warm up our body and the way that hockey programs from mites to the NHL traditionally warm up, you’re not doing that with the drills you’re doing. I don’t think we have perfected the exact drills that get them there. We’ll keep talking to the players and tweaking it, but the whole point is to warm up your brain and decision making and feeling pressure and taking a bump and then just make a play. We’ll see how it goes, and we’ll keep tweaking.”
To review from our initial coverage of the new warmup, here is a snippet from our piece from the Windsor game covering its debut:
The drill requires quick decision-making and tests a player’s ability to send and receive passes. Meanwhile, the defender or defenders on the interior of the ring sharpen the efficiency of the defensive pressure they apply, trying to seal off passing lanes and anticipate their opposition’s next move. It is an exercise favored by teams that intend to dominate games through possession, and it forces players to get comfortable operating in tight spaces.
A year ago, you would see the Wolverines use a more traditional pattern of looping from the corner into the slot to receive a pass and take an uncontested shot as a warmup. Unlike the rondo, that drill does nothing to force players into processing information and reacting at speeds that compare to game pace. While the frenetic pace of the rondo acclimates a player to what they will experience in a game, the aforementioned traditional warmup conditions players for situations that will not exist in live action.
Johan Cruyff—who was Guardiola’s coach at Barcelona and can claim the title of soccer’s patron saint of a possession-based attacking style—said of the drill "Everything that goes on in a match, except shooting, you can do in a rondo. The competitive aspect, fighting to make space, what to do when in possession and what to do when you haven’t got the ball, how to play ‘one touch’ soccer, how to counteract the tight marking and how to win the ball back."
As you can see, Cruyff’s explanation mirrors Naurato’s: the rondo (or a hockey-adapted version of it) offers a much closer facsimile of game play than receiving a hapless pass in the slot and taking as much time as you care to before picking a corner.
In a conversation after an early October practice, junior defenseman Steve Holtz explained the transferable nature of the work he and his teammates do with Naurato. In discussing a drill from the afternoon’s session in which the team worked on flipping from defense to offense, Holtz explained “It’s just trying to make quick decisions and trying to get the puck up the ice quick, catch the other team on their toes—little details that Nar is huge on. It really makes a difference because…when we’re in a game that play happens so many times. When you have that repetition through practice, it’s automatic. Like you know exactly what to do and everyone’s on the same page. We all know what we’re doing.”
At a Naurato-led practice, finding teammates and vacant ice—the basic objectives of the rondo from the perspective of the offensive players—is a constant theme. For these practices, the team is split down the middle with half the team in blue jerseys and half in maize. Most drills involve some element of competition between the two sides, and, more often than not, that competition rewards sharp decisions on the puck and tireless movement without it.
A recent practice opened with spirited rounds of five-on-five keep away in the offensive zone.
In this instance, the drill is remarkably simple: five players to a side, the offensive zone to operate in, don’t let the other team get the puck. Still, at a basic level, the drill tests Michigan’s skaters on decision making with the puck, getting open and providing support to a teammate who has the puck, and maintaining defensive awareness should you lose it.
If a basic game of schoolyard keep away is the simplest incarnation of this exercise, Naurato also drills his team on more complex variations. At a practice earlier this month, Michigan dragged both nets into the offensive zone for two different competition-based drills.
In the first, both nets faced the same direction with one in its standard location on the goal line and the other just above the tops of the circles. Assistants Rob Rassey and Bill Muckalt stood along either half-wall, offering a passing outlet to both teams. From there, the Wolverines took turns playing brief three-on-three games, in which either side could score on either net.
It might be easy to dismiss a drill with one net in front of the other in the same end of the rink as irrelevant to a game situation, yet the setup forces a heightened awareness of space for all players involved. Offensively, the drill challenges players’ awareness of space and anticipation to create scoring opportunities in a frenetic context. Defensively, the drill forces players to be razor-sharp in their assessments of danger, as the simultaneous protection of two nets requires acute awareness of all three opposing attackers.
After the initial three-on-three competition, both nets moved to the goal line—still facing the same direction, but this time stationed in line with the faceoff dots. Instead of a single game of three-on-three, this time the drill involved two modified four-on-two rondos. Unlike those used in warmups, these rondos also allowed each team to score on the net where they had the four-on-two advantage. Meanwhile, the two defenders would try to win the puck back and send it to the opposite side of the rink, where they had a manpower advantage. No player was allowed to cross over the middle of the ice, meaning you would remain either an attacker or defender throughout your rep.
One word that you hear over and over from Naurato and his players is “connected.” This drill tests that principle by demanding that players depend on and combine with teammates on the opposite half of the rink whom they cannot provide with direct support.
As Cruyff explained to us in his case for the rondo, the basic benefit is that the drill involves every aspect of playing in a game with the exception of shooting. In this modified version, Naurato added that one elusive skill to the challenge. For Naurato, a key to effective training is translating what he saw in data and video as growth areas into bespoke drills that will challenge the Wolverines in those areas.
After October 11th’s practice, Naurato walks reporters through his process for transferring in-game data into teaching and coaching at practice. With a packet of data sets and charts on his desk as a visual aid, Naurato explains “So, this is an example, this is Friday [the season opener against Lindenwood], we gave up seven [chances] on d-zone coverage, three off the rush. So we focused a lot on D-zone coverage, so we gave up zero the next night, but ten off the rush. So then the next question would be why? So you’ve watched those rushes…You know if a D goes down and we don’t have somebody that fills, that would be another way to give up rush chances because we’re not above. I’m basically saying ten rush chances against is a problem. What’s my solution? Well I’ve got to identify the problem. I gotta find my solution, and then my action plan would be the drill design to get it in that week. Watch video, drill design, and then individual meetings.”
He goes on to explain that iterating on existing drills or developing new ones is an essential part of this process, rather than falling back on ancient wisdom. “We make up new drills all the time. The old school culture is “Ah! This [drill] is what we do, but [the players] have to problem solve. If I just tell them what to do, they’re going to be good at things robotically…, but what if they see different stuff?”
In this last rhetorical question, Naurato elucidates a key premise of his team’s training: rote memorization of systems or patterns is of little benefit without the ability to read and react to the fluid and frenetic conditions players will inevitably encounter on the ice. A system is necessary for players to work with one another and know where they can count on teammates for support, but it is up to players to make the right reads.
This is the idea behind Naurato’s organizing CPR principle: Michigan’s players must be Creative enough to express their talents, Predictable in the patterns of support they offer one another when confronted by pressure, and Responsible in reading their teammates’ movements and assessing their own duties.
Of course, just as the coach described a need to continue tweaking the new warmup routine, conversations with or about Naurato always return to the idea that no process or principle can ever calcify. Instead, the priority is an incessant drive for self-perfection.
Freshman forward Rutger McGroarty, whose father Jim coached Naurato for the USHL’s Omaha Lancers and who began working with Naurato on skills at age eleven, summed it up best:
“Nar is always expanding his brain…He watches video all day every day. He just loves finding the ins and outs of the game, and he loves hockey, and he loves Michigan, so he’ll do anything to make us better…There’s some different things [now that Naurato is a head coach instead of a development one], but he’s still got the same energy. He still wants the best for everybody.”
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