Reading Ice Hockey Diagrams

Key focus

Read the caption first, and believe it over the picture. A diagram freezes one moment of one system among several. The caption says what the picture is for, which details are a coaching choice, and what a shaded region or a darker tint means — so ask which version your team runs rather than taking the drawing as the answer.

Find yourself next. Shape is the position — a circle is a forward, a triangle a defenceman, a bare G the goaltender — and fill is the team: open is yours, solid is theirs. The letter inside is your role, not your spot: on the forecheck, F1 is whichever forward reaches the puck first, so if that is you, the F1 route is yours whichever forward position you play. Some coaches assign F1 by position instead, so check how yours does it.

Follow the routes in number order where they are numbered, and read how each one ends. A small numbered tag gives the order things happen, never who does them. An arrowhead means the move carries on past the end of the line; two short bars mean the player stops there, under control.

Read where a player is relative to the puck and the other players, not as a spot on the ice. Positions are drawn at one instant. On the ice, keep the relationship as the puck moves rather than skating to the drawn mark and staying there.

Treat a route that ends on an opponent as "arrive under control", never as permission to hit. The mark says where you stop, not whether you may make contact. Whether you may body-check at all depends on your age group, your league and your book — find out before you play one, and until you know, do not hit anyone.

Check the key before you read anyone else's diagram — and on your own team, the coach's whiteboard wins. Shape as position follows one published key and reading fill as the team is this guide's own choice, and neither is universal: the IIHF's own key uses the two shapes for the two teams, so a defending right wing there is a triangle. Where no key is printed, ask whoever drew it before the drill starts.

Overview

A diagram is only useful if you can turn it into what you do on your next shift, and the reading order above is how. Start with the caption. A diagram is the most absolute-looking thing on a page, but it shows one moment of one system among several, and the caption is where it says so — which detail is a coaching choice, whether a shaded box is ice to head for or ice a pass must never cross, and what order a set of tints ranks in. Where the caption and your eye disagree, the caption wins; where it names a choice, ask which version your team runs.

Then find yourself. A circle is a forward and a triangle is a defenceman, a goaltender is a bare G with no shape around it, and an X is a pylon — a practice cone, never a player. An open glyph is your own team and a solid one the opposition. A winger is a circle whether attacking or backchecking, because the shape follows the player rather than the moment. The letter inside is a role: on the forecheck, F1 is whichever forward gets to the puck first, not the centre, so the route you play is set by what happens rather than by the name on your line-up card — though some coaches assign F1 by position, so check how yours does it.

Then run the routes in order and read where each one stops. Numbered tags give the sequence — the pass before the forechecker arrives, or after. An arrowhead carries on; two short bars stop there under control. And read the positions as relationships: where a defenceman sits relative to the puck and the attacker, where a support forward sits relative to the carrier. That relationship is what you keep on the ice as the puck moves — the drawn spot is only where it was at one instant.

A route that finishes on an opponent is not an instruction to hit. The bars say where you arrive and that you arrive under control; whether you may make contact depends on your age group, your league and your book, and many youth, women's and non-check adult leagues ban body checking outright. Find out what yours allows before you play any route that finishes on a player.

Last, check whose key it is. Shape as position follows one published key, and reading fill as the team is this guide's own choice; the other key cited below uses the same two shapes for the two teams instead, which is the first thing to know if you meet a diagram from somewhere else. On your own team, your coach's whiteboard wins. Colour carries nothing in the player glyphs or the line symbols, which is why they still work printed, photocopied or in either theme; the one exception is a region drawn as a hazard, tinted red rather than blue — a difference greyscale loses, so its caption says in words which it is. You do not need to memorise the rest; come back when a symbol is unfamiliar.

The notation is drawn from two published symbol keys, and one symbol is compared below against a third source that is a coaching manual with its own house key, not a governing-body one. The two keys disagree in places, so it is worth two minutes to know which is which.

Where each symbol comes from

Six line symbols are drawn the same way in both keys: forward skating, skate and stickhandle, passing, shooting, the drop pass and the two-bar mark. The two keys often differ on what to call a symbol even where they draw it identically — the wave is skate and stickhandle on one and skating with control of the puck on the other, and the two-bar mark is a sudden stop on one and stopping on the other. Where this guide had to pick one name in public, the bullets below say which. Backward skating is not one of them: the Hockey Eastern Ontario sheet draws it as a tight wave, and the IIHF key draws it as a row of separate overlapping arches, flatter than they are wide. These diagrams follow the IIHF key. A sharp zigzag — straight lines and corners rather than curves — is backward crossovers, and that one is the IIHF key's as well. A bare hook, curling in low and leaving the other way, is a pivot: turning from forwards to backwards or back again. Both keys have it and draw it differently — the Hockey Eastern Ontario sheet runs a wave into the hook — and these diagrams follow the IIHF key's hook. It is in the key above for when you meet it elsewhere, and in no play diagram here, because which way a player is facing is not something this notation can draw. The rest:

• A line ending in two bars is a sudden stop — the IIHF key's name for it, and the one the key above uses. The Hockey Eastern Ontario sheet draws the same mark and calls it stopping, so the two keys agree on the glyph and differ only on the name. The IIHF key's plain stop, a pair of slashes, is a different mark and is drawn here too.

• A line ending in one bar is not used here at all, and that is deliberate. It means checking pressure on the Hockey Eastern Ontario sheet, and the IIHF key has no such symbol — one bar is half of its two-bar sudden stop, and a second published meaning exists — a coaching manual whose key gives the same mark as screen, pick, or block (Johnston & Walter, Hockey Plays and Strategies, 2nd ed., 2019). One mark, two published meanings and one published key that does not define it at all. Draw a one-bar route for pressure and an IIHF-trained reader sees a player stopping where you meant a player closing. It is the clearest reason on this page not to assume a key you meet elsewhere matches this one.

• A route that closes on an opponent ends in the two-bar mark, not an arrowhead, and that is the one place these diagrams knowingly draw one glyph for two things. The two-bar mark is the sudden stop above; a pressure route also ends in it. The reason is that the two marks have to be told apart by where the route finishes rather than by their shape. An arrowhead reads as continuing past the point the line ends at; the bars read as ending there. Where that end point is an opponent rather than open ice, read the bars as arrive under control, and the destination and the caption carry the rest. The IIHF key does have a mark for a hit — a line ending in a small curled bracket, which it names body check — so a drill drawn to that key can say "hit here" outright. That tells you what the drill's author had in mind, not what your league allows.

• Bars across a line are lateral crossovers — the one line symbol here taken from the Hockey Eastern Ontario sheet rather than the IIHF key, because the IIHF key has no lateral-crossover symbol at all. (The player glyphs come from that sheet as well; it is the line symbols that are mostly the IIHF key's.) It is kept, where the one-bar pressure glyph was not, because a barred line collides with nothing in the IIHF key, so it cannot be read as some other symbol. The published glyph is a bare picket of bars with no line through it and no direction; the arrow and the line are added here, because a picket that does not say which way you are going is no use in a play diagram. The IIHF key's nearest equivalent is a different shape again.

• Dropping the puck follows neither key. Both draw it as a wave — the carrier skating with the puck — then a marker, then a straight line and an arrowhead. These diagrams draw the marker and the straight line without the leading wave, so the mark shows the drop and not the carry that set it up. It is this guide's own version.

What a tinted area or a faint dashed line means

Shaded regions and faint dashed lines are this guide's own, and neither published key has anything like them. Many diagrams here wash an area of the ice in a light tint with a thin dashed edge, usually with its name written inside it — the slot, the house, home plate, the box, the passing lane. Neither key defines an area symbol of any kind: the Hockey Eastern Ontario sheet's seventeen rows are players, lines and a cluster of pucks, and the IIHF key's own list runs from players to body check with no region mark in it. So this one is a house convention rather than a borrowed symbol, and four things are worth knowing about it.

First, the tint is not paint on the ice unless the caption says it is. The slot, the house and the high slot are names for regions rather than markings, and Rink Map is where their edges are defined. The edge is drawn thin and broken on purpose so that it cannot be taken for a line on the rink. The trapezoid is the exception — that one really is painted, and its caption says so.

Second, the shading does not tell you whether the region is somewhere to go or somewhere to stay out of. The caption does, and the diagrams here use it both ways: a shaded box marks the ice a centre is heading for in one picture and the ice a pass must never cross in another. Where the region is a hazard it is tinted red rather than blue, and that is the one thing in this notation carried by colour alone — at a light wash the two tints are nearly identical in greyscale or a photocopy, so the caption is what you should be reading.

Third, drawn between two points with no tint at all, the same mark is a line rather than a region: faint, dashed, with a short name beside it. It marks something you need to see that is neither on the ice nor a route — the royal road, the imaginary line down the middle of the ice from one net to the other that a pass crosses to make a goaltender push hard sideways (Shooting owns it), or the shooting lane a defenceman had a second ago before an opponent stepped into it. Nothing travels along it and nobody skates it; it is there so you can see what someone else is set up for.

Fourth, where one region is tinted more heavily than another in the same picture, the strength of the tint is a ranking rather than a second symbol. The map of what a mistake costs in Risk Management grades ice by how expensive a turnover there is. It marks five regions: four in red and one in blue, and the four reds carry only three strengths, because two of them are deliberately identical. ⚠️ That equality is the picture's teaching rather than an oversight — the middle of the neutral zone is shaded exactly as heavily as your own end, because a mistake in the two costs about the same — so do not expect four distinguishable reds and do not try to rank them by eye. Nothing new is being said with colour — red is still the hazard tint and blue still the ice you want — but the depth of the red is carrying an order, and neither published key has anything of the sort. ⚠️ Read that order out of the caption, not off the page. A light wash is a poor ranking device: the tints are close together by design, greyscale and photocopying compress them further, and where a red region has to be compared against a blue one the order inverts outright, because a light blue prints darker than the faintest red. So a graded picture names its regions in order in words, and the words are the part to trust.

Shape, fill and what goes inside a glyph

Shape is the position. The International Drill Symbols sheet gives it in two lines — "● ○ Forward / Player" and "▲ △ Defender / Player" — so a circle is a forward and a triangle is a defenceman, and that stays true of a player from one picture to the next. A goaltender is a bare G. Both keys offer that form — though the IIHF key also carries a goaltender a second way, as the numeral 1 inside a team glyph, which is the convention this guide does not use. No shape is wrapped round the letter here because a circle would say forward and a triangle would say defenceman.

The IIHF key does this differently, and if you meet it you will be caught out. Its columns read TEAMS — OFFENSIVE / DEFENSIVE, with circles in one column and triangles in the other, and the position carried by a numeral inside — 1 goaltender, 2 right defence, through 6 left wing. ⚠️ On that key a right wing on the defending team is a triangle. Two published keys, two incompatible meanings for the same two shapes; these diagrams follow the Hockey Eastern Ontario sheet.

Fill is the team. An open glyph is your own team and a solid one the opposition. The key prints a solid and an open version of each player row without saying what the difference means — "● ○ Forward / Player" could as easily be read as solid-is-a-forward and open-is-any-player — so reading that pair as the two teams is this guide's doing rather than the key's. So both facts are in every picture: the shape tells you what a player is, the fill tells you whose side they are on. Neither depends on colour, so neither is lost in greyscale, in a photocopy, or to a reader who does not see red and green apart.

Which side has the puck is not carried by the shapes at all — the puck is drawn, and the caption says the rest. It is a small solid dot, about a third the width of a player, and it is this guide's own mark: neither key publishes a symbol for a single puck. Keep it apart from the marker on a drop-pass line, which is the same ink and sits on a route rather than beside a player.

Two departures on top of that, so you are not caught out:

1. The letters inside a glyph are roles, not positions. The IIHF key puts a numeral inside — 1 goaltender, 2 right defence, 3 left defence, 4 right wing, 5 centre, 6 left wing. They are not used here, because F1, F2 and F3 are roles set by order of arrival and not people, and a numeral would say "F1 is the centre" where the text takes care to say it is not. So the glyph carries whatever label the surrounding section uses. One of those labels collides: a circled C means coach on both published keys, and here it means a centre. No diagram in this guide draws a coach, so nothing is ambiguous on the page — but on someone else's diagram a circled C is the person on the bench.
2. Reading fill as the team at all is this corpus's choice, and so is which fill means "you". The key prints both a solid and an open version of every player row without saying what the pair is for — it could as easily mean solid-is-a-forward and open-is-any-player — and it has no opposition symbol of any kind. Here open is yours and solid is theirs.

And one thing that is almost not a departure: the player glyphs and the line symbols are monochrome, and none of the keys consulted separates the teams by colour either. That is agreement, not invention. It is done so that a printed page, a photocopy and a reader who does not see red and green apart all get the same information as the screen — which holds for every symbol here except the red tint on a hazard region, where the caption has to carry the warning instead.

The word "international"

Both keys above carry the word "international" in their titles — International Drill Symbols and International Symbols — and what is drawn here is neither of them, ⚠️ so do not call this notation "international" to anyone. The one-bar glyph above is the sharpest illustration: the Hockey Eastern Ontario sheet calls it checking pressure, a coaching manual calls it screen, pick, or block, and the IIHF key does not define it at all. Neither meaning is wrong inside the system it belongs to; they are simply not the same system. None of this has been checked against how any particular club or coach actually draws things; if your coach's whiteboard disagrees, their whiteboard wins.

Numbered tags on a route

Numbered tags say what happened first, and they count routes rather than players. A still picture cannot say whether the pass beat the forechecker or the forechecker beat the pass, so where the order matters each route carries a small numbered tag a short way along it. The numbers run in the order the things happen. They are never a player's name and never sit inside a player's shape, which is where the letters go — and like the shading, the tag is this guide's own and appears in neither key.

What a diagram is and is not

A diagram shows one moment. A movement that only makes sense over time needs two diagrams, so where you see a pair, read them as a sequence or as two answers to the same instant — the captions say which. And a picture is the most absolute-looking thing on a page: where a caption says a detail is a coaching choice, believe the caption, not the picture.

Common Mistakes

• Reading a diagram as the way hockey is played. Believe the caption, then ask which version your team runs. A picture is the most absolute-looking thing on a page, but almost every diagram here shows one system among several, and the caption says so.
• Taking a shape as a place to stand. Read where a player is relative to the puck and the other players, and on the ice keep that relationship as the puck moves rather than skating to the drawn mark and staying there. Positions in a diagram are drawn at one instant; where the play moves, the shape moves with it.
• Assuming a key you meet elsewhere means the same thing. Check the key in front of you before you read the picture, and where no key is printed, ask whoever drew it. The two shapes are the biggest trap: a circle is a forward here and the attacking team on the IIHF's own key, so the same picture reads two ways. One mark — a line ending in a single bar — is checking pressure in one published key and screen, pick, or block in a coaching manual, while the IIHF key has no one-bar symbol at all: there, one bar is half of its two-bar sudden stop.
• Reading the letter inside a glyph as where a player stands. On the forecheck, when you are the first forward to the puck, do F1's job, whichever forward position you play. The letters here mark a role set by who does what during the play, not a position — F1 is whoever arrives at the puck first, not automatically the centre, though some coaches assign it by position (the fuller case is in Forechecking Systems). The same letter can collide with an unrelated meaning on someone else's key, too: a circled C means coach on both published keys consulted here and centre in this guide.
• Assuming your coach uses these symbols. If your coach's whiteboard disagrees, their whiteboard wins — and if a mark on it is new to you, ask before the drill starts. Nothing here has been checked against how any particular club draws things.
• Reading a route that ends on an opponent as permission to hit. Find out what your league allows before you play any route that finishes on a player, and until you know, do not hit anyone. The two bars at the end say where you stop and that you arrive under control — never whether you may make contact. Whether body checking is allowed at all depends on your age group, your league and your book, and many youth, women's and non-check adult leagues ban it. Body Contact and Battles sets out the books.
• Taking a shaded region for a marking on the ice. Learn where each region sits from Rink Map and find it on the ice from the lines that are painted — the circles, the dots, the crease. The slot, the house and the rest are names for areas, not paint; go and look at a rink and there is no line marking any of them out. The trapezoid is the one shaded region in these diagrams that really is painted, and its caption says so.
• Ranking regions by how dark they look. Take the order from the caption's words, never from how dark a region looks. On the turnover-cost map in Risk Management two of the reds are deliberately the same, so there are fewer steps than there are regions — and in greyscale or on a photocopy the comparison across the red and blue tints inverts outright, because a light blue prints darker than the faintest red.
• Expecting a diagram to show a whole play. Read the caption before you read a pair of diagrams: it says whether they are a sequence or two answers to the same instant. One frame shows one moment, so where a movement only makes sense over time you will find two.

Key Takeaways

1. Read a diagram in this order: the caption, then your own position, then the routes in order, then where each route ends. The caption tells you what the picture is for and which details are a coaching choice. Your own position is the open shape carrying your role. Where routes carry small numbered tags, those give the order things happen in. And at the end of each line, an arrowhead means the move carries on past that point, two short bars mean the player stops there under control, and a backward-skating route simply ends where it is drawn.
2. A circle is a forward; a triangle is a defenceman; a goaltender is a bare G. An open glyph is your own team; a solid one is the opposition. Shape and fill carry different facts, so the diagrams work in either theme, in print and in greyscale. A player's shape does not change when play turns — a winger is a circle backchecking as well as attacking. Reading fill as the team is this guide's own convention — the key prints the pair and never says what it is for — so on another diagram open and solid may mean nothing at all. ⚠️ The IIHF's own key uses these two shapes for the two teams instead, with the position as a numeral inside, so do not carry this reading onto one of its diagrams.
3. An X is a pylon — a practice cone — and never a player.
4. Solid arrow, forward skating. Long smooth wave, skate and stickhandle. A row of overlapping flattened arches, skating backwards — each arch is a C-cut, the half-circle a skate carves to push backwards, turned on its side and repeated — and a sharp zigzag, backward crossovers. Dashed arrow, a pass. Double line, a shot. A line ending in two short bars is a route that stops where it ends — the mark used where a player closes on an opponent, and the one to read as arrive under control rather than carry on through. Those cover most of what you will meet. The two bars say where you stop, never whether you may make contact — whether body checking is allowed at all depends on your age group, your league and your book, so find out before you play one.
5. A tinted area with a dashed edge is a named region of ice, and the same mark between two points with no tint is a line that is not on the ice. Neither published key has either one, so both are this guide's own. The tint never says whether the region is somewhere to go or somewhere to keep out of — the caption does, and it is the caption that carries the warning where one is tinted red. Where a picture tints regions at different strengths, that is a ranking — and the ranking is in the caption's words, because washes that close together are not reliably ordered by eye, some of them are deliberately equal, and the comparison across the red and blue tints inverts in greyscale or on a photocopy.
6. A small numbered tag on a route says what happened first. It counts routes in order, never players, and it never sits inside a player's shape.
7. The letters inside a glyph are roles, not positions. On the forecheck, F1 is whichever forward reaches the puck first, so when that is you, the F1 route is yours. Some coaches assign F1 by position instead, so check how yours does it.
8. A drawn position is a relationship to the puck and the other players, not a spot to skate to.
9. Where a caption says a detail is a coaching choice, it is. Ask which version your team runs rather than taking the picture as the answer.
10. On a diagram from anywhere else, check its key before you read it. A line ending in a single bar appears in none of these diagrams, on purpose: it is checking pressure on one published key and screen, pick, or block in a coaching manual, and the IIHF key has no one-bar symbol at all — one bar there is half of its two-bar sudden stop. None of this notation has been checked against how any real club or coach draws things. If your coach's whiteboard disagrees with a symbol here, their whiteboard wins — and ask about any mark you do not know before the drill starts. No key settles whether you may hit, not even one with a mark for a body check: your age group, league and book decide that, and until you know, do not hit anyone.

Sources — retrieved 30 July 2026

Rules: USA Hockey Official Playing Rules 2025-29 (PDF) — Rule 604(a), body checking prohibited "in the 12 & under youth age classifications and below, all Girls'/Women's age classifications and all non-check Adult classifications" · Hockey Canada Playing Rules 2026-2028 (PDF) — Rule 7.3(a), a minor for a player who "intentionally body-checks, bumps, shoves, or pushes any opposing player, in divisions of U13 and below, female hockey, and any other divisions approved by a Member of Hockey Canada". Both are cited in the note above, which sends a reader to Body Contact and Battles before acting on a route that finishes on a player.

IIHF Coach Development Program, Level I (Tactical), §21.1 "International Symbols": PDF — most of the line symbols. sha256 9b195d03…, 750,071 bytes, 2002.

Second meaning of the one-bar glyph: Mike Johnston and Ryan Walter, Hockey Plays and Strategies, 2nd ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2019), "Key to Diagrams" — no page number. The copy consulted is the fixed-layout Kindle edition (ASIN B07GX64NNL), whose pages are images with no text layer, and no locator was recorded at the time. Nothing held here carries the page, so this one citation cannot be checked against anything on disk. That entry gives the same mark as "screen, pick, or block". Its other line symbols agree with the two keys above: solid arrow for skating without the puck, wave for skating with it, dashed for a pass, double for a shot. The one-bar mark is the only divergence, and it is the only thing cited here; nothing else in this document comes from the book, which is a coaching manual with a house key rather than a governing body's.

"International Drill Symbols", Hockey Eastern Ontario NCCP Development 1 clinic handout: PDF — the source of the player glyphs, and of "lateral crossovers", which the IIHF key does not define. sha256 d0cfeca1…, 309,926 bytes.

James Bloom, "Reading Ice Hockey Diagrams", Learning to Play the Game. https://learn-ice-hockey.com/reading-diagrams/reading_ice_hockey_diagrams/ — licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.

<a href="https://learn-ice-hockey.com/reading-diagrams/reading_ice_hockey_diagrams/">Reading Ice Hockey Diagrams</a> by <a href="https://github.com/jamesdbloom">James Bloom</a>, licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC 4.0</a>.

@misc{reading-diagrams-reading-ice-hockey-diagrams,
  author  = {James Bloom},
  title   = {Reading Ice Hockey Diagrams},
  howpublished = {Learning to Play the Game},
  url     = {https://learn-ice-hockey.com/reading-diagrams/reading_ice_hockey_diagrams/},
  note    = {Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}