Quote:
Originally Posted by UFO
I remember a SI article from a few years back, apparently 70% of Canadian hockey players shoot left, and 70% of US hockey players shoot right.
Reason being most people are right handed naturally. When you are playing hockey at a young age for things like stick handling, skating, you are usually only holding the stick with one hand on top, so, the right hand, and therefore you shoot left. I can't imagine being right handed and trying to stickhandle with my left hand on top. For US hockey players, usually hockey is not the first sport, baseball is. So they learn to bat right, then when they try hockey, they've already established that preference. Not sure how true that study was, but it makes at least some sense to me.
For me I am right handed and shoot left. I started off shooting right when I was young, then played goalie for a good few years catching with my left hand so I can hold the stick in my right, and then that became my natural shooting side. I bat and swing right though, I cannot do those left sided for the life of me. Funny how that works.
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It is strange... Because if I wanted good stick control, I would use my lower hand (right) to control it. Naturally, holding a stick lower would give it more control... I find it hard to use the top hand to control puck handling.
The only exception is when I'm going for poke checks, being a right shooter myself, I would have to poke with only my left hand on the stick... I would poke check a lot better if it was my right hand on top, but that's a small sacrifice for me, since all my shots are better if my right hand is on the lower end.
But yeah, it is strange how this all works. I cannot come up with a logical explaination for this.