Snipe Lights is proud to present Part 1 in a series of interviews with NHL shooting and scoring coach Tim Turk.
Tim specializes in teaching hockey shooting and passing, along with puck preparation and control and the technical aspects of puck protection. Hockey shooting targets like Snipe Lights are a perfect way to implement Tim’s shooting instruction into your practices, and because Snipe Lights is an interactive hockey shooting target system, it simulates shooting on a real goalie.
Tim has worked directly with the Montreal Canadiens, Tampa Bay Lightning, Carolina Hurricanes, Arizona Coyotes, and Calgary Flames, as well as many national programs overseas.
Tim has coached a who’s who of NHL players, including Connor Bedard, Brendan Gallagher, Nazem Kadri, Nick Foligno, and Victor Hedman.
Tim also works with minor hockey teams, coaches, and players of all ages and levels.
His hockey development company, Tim Turk Hockey, has recently developed an online training website along with other services enabling players to access his training from anywhere in the world.
Snipe Lights: How did you get started in sports and coaching?
Tim: The first thing that comes to mind is how, growing up as kids in Canada, we were all multi-sport athletes. I think it’s the same way today. I was always caught between hockey and football. I got to the stage where I realized that I really liked contact sports and loved the challenge of doing different things on the ice. But I would have to switch it up every season. When it was cold out, it was hockey time. When it was warmer, it was football time. I had a real passion for both.
In Canada, though, football isn’t one of the top sports out there. There’s some minor football, but it’s isolated and limited to certain areas. But hockey is everywhere. So, for my development, there weren’t any football schools around, but there was always hockey school.
As I got into my early teens, a goalie coach approached me and needed shooters for his sessions. He had this small setup in an industrial unit—a four-by-three-foot synthetic piece of plastic for the pucks to slide on and a bigger piece about 25 feet away where he’d position the goalie in front of a net. He’d say, ‘I want you to shoot at the goalies—low glove, high glove, blocker side, low stick.’ He was teaching them butterfly action with a proper seal.
I did this for nearly two years, and it was so cool. I got to make some money as a kid and had some spending money each week. I got so passionate about it that I wanted to do it every day after school.
After a couple of years, the coach noticed that I had developed a lot of accuracy. He’d say, “When I ask you to shoot low glove, you hit low glove. When I ask for high blocker, you can shoot it there.” So, I would alternate, and he would say, “Okay, do a little glove shot, let the goalie recover, and then go to the blocker side. It would help him to teach his goalies their habitual motion patterns.
The coach was high-energy and very positive, which wasn’t as common back then. It was easy to find coaches that could yell at you for what you’re doing wrong way back then. This was 30 plus years ago.
I kept working with him for quite a while. I would do a half-hour session and then take a half-hour off. He would work with the goalies on their motion patterns when I was taking my breaks. This worked out well because if we didn’t take breaks from shooting, my arms would fall off and the goalies would get really tired.
One day he said to me, “You could teach shooting.”
And I said, “No, no, I’m alright.” This was all so easy for me, and I didn’t think about money or business. I was just having so much fun doing what I was doing, and I got to get some homework done on the breaks.
Fast forward a bit, and he told me he was going to open a shooting school. He thought I could teach in his style. So that’s what I did. But early on I was wondering how the heck we were going to get shooters to come in.
The coach had a plan for that. He put a sign on the wall that said any goalie that brings in a shooter gets a free training session. So the parents jumped on that. Every goalie knew at least two players who needed shooting training.
He built up the shooting school quickly from there. Local players like Jason Spezza, Andrew Cogliano, and Steven Stamkos came in as 11- and 12-year-olds and went on to play in the NHL. Back then, we were the only shooting school around.
Then once these young players started making it to the higher elite levels, they had these great shots, and people started asking where they learned to shoot like that. They would tell the other players that I was their shooting coach, and it took off from there.
Stay tuned for part 2 of our interview series with Tim Turk as we take a deep dive into Tim’s teaching methods, the mechanics of shooting, and the evolution of hockey training and highlight more ways to use hockey shooting targets like Snipe Lights to put Tim’s training into action.
Also be sure to check out Tim on Instagram, YouTube, and his website here!
Related links:
Snipe Lights Builds Confidence and Self-Esteem in Young Hockey Players