Joe Garry
This seems fairly simple, and honestly, it sort of is. The thing most parents aren’t aware of when they start this journey of youth hockey is that the skate laces in your child’s skates are often way too long. This is where the problem begins. You get to the top of the skate and are now about to tie them, but you still have two lace ends that are massively long. What do you do? You use your thinking cap and decide, I’ll just wrap them around my kid’s ankles. Once you do this, you say to yourself, wow that worked well. It actually solved the problem of not having any more long laces. Unfortunately, you now just potentially killed your child’s ability to flex his skate. When the laces are wrapped around the top of the skate, it often inhibits ankle flex because he now can’t flex the skate. You need to be able to flex the skate to put power into each push of the skate.
There are exceptions to every rule, and I always say there is nothing wrong with experimenting. I know one player who wraps his laces around his skates and is one of the fastest guys I know. He could be the fastest if he had proper knee flex, but that’s another story.
The reason I bring this up is not to tell everyone how to tie their skates. It is because I see parents and kids constantly tying their skates differently. This is not because they are experimenting it is because there wasn’t a good plan and this was the best quick solution.
I’ll say “hey Billy, why do you have your skate laces wrapped around your ankles today…and he will say my lace broke so I got new ones, The laces were too long so my father tied them this way. Really…Really!