There had a lot of questions about tapes, different types of tapes, different ways to tape your stick. So today, I thought I’ll give you guys How to Tape a Hockey Stick: From the Blade to the Handle and Butt and let you know everything about different types of Hockey stick tape .
Anybody who’s played hockey before realizes that their stick tape ends up looking terrible after about two minutes of playing. Therefore, what I wanted to do is I want to go through a couple of different ways that you end up taping your Hockey stick and the hows and whys of why Puckdrawn Hockey does that.
Types of tapes for your hockey sticks
I brought with me just a few random pieces of tape that I had in my bag. This is some of the stuff I carry with me at the rink. We’ve got a different colored tape. We’ve got the clear tape, double-wide tape, we got a magical tape, which is my personal favorite.
One of the exciting things about guys as far as grip tape goes is that it doesn’t stick, so when you want to go, remove it if you cut it along the back. It doesn’t stick to the blade. So you can remove it nice and easy.
How to tape the handle of hockey stick ?
The first thing I’m going to talk about is the handle. It is a personal preference. Some guys like a real big fat knob at the top, some guys like tape down, that’s a personal practice.
To me, I want a tiny amount of knob at the top. Just lets me know where the end of the stick is. Anything on the inside is fine. Outside, I use gauze on the outside. It’s sticky enough for you to know where the grip is, but it’s not so sticky to tears your gloves up.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to take my guys and take a piece of it. I’ll fold it in half, stretch it out, creates a double-thick piece, placed all the way around top cool—thing about god’s it kind of sticks on itself.
You can do a rapping a round thing like that and just sort of stick to itself. This is exactly how I wrap my steaks.
*Note: You can go larger on that if you want. What I don’t recommend is that you overuse the tape because that gets expensive every time you want to change your handle.
Read more: 5 things EVERY hockey player should know about sticks before buying
- Ways to cheat: There’s a lot of ways to cheat. One way to cheat to take the old tape, take dirty messed up the tape and fold it in half or whatever you want to do and wrap that around first, and then go on the outside. Do one quick layer around the outside of that way. You’ve got the thickness of that nice fat roll, without wasting all your nice new pretty tape.
Ways to tape your handle?
There’s a lot of different things you can do, what they handle a lot of guys.
- Nowadays, they like a nice grip, feel that goes around all the way down. It gives you these finger holes as you would see on the grip of a knife or the grip of a gun.
- One of the ways that they do that is they take your standard tape. We’re going to use the black one to show this. They start at the top and make a layer around go around once. Then you get a big old end of it. And then you start twisting and twisting. You’ll twist it until you get a twisty feeling on the tape. And this becomes like a piece of string.
- A better way to do this is to cheat, to take a shoelace, and use a shoelace to do this. That way, you don’t waste your nice pretty tape.
- If you don’t have a shoelace or if you’re too cheap or lazy or whatever or you like to do it the way the pros do it. You lace it around the grip and all the way down until you reach the point where the tape starts again, and then you go back around it, the sequential pattern. And then, you’ve got that nice ribbed effect on the tape.
So when you’re gripping it, you can actually feel that grip and your fingers. You can feel that riveting effect. What I don’t like about this black tape it’s too sticky. It’s gonna eat your gloves; use gauze!
How to tape the blade of hockey stick ?
The blade a tricky part. There’s a lot of rumors about stick tape. They say you got to go from the toe to the heel, or you got to go from the heel to the toe, or you got to put a piece of tape on the bottom first, or you got to put a piece of tape on the top.
All of that is false. It’s all about personal preference until you reach the level where you’re making 22 million—dollars a year to play this game. You’re never going to feel the difference instinct tape changing the direction of the pattern or putting more tape on or less tape on. That has nothing to do with it.
All the tape does is affects the grip of the puck. No matter which way you lace it from the toe to the heel from the heel to the toe that doesn’t matter. The only matters are the type of teeth that you choose.
Types of blade tapes
There are basically two different types of tape.
You have cheater tape and non-cheater tape for the blade. Of the non-cheater tapes, you’ve got black, blue, green, white. The two typicals be the white in the black, and that’s a personal preference.
None of them stick any better than the other the only one that’s a different type of stickiness is the cheater table. When you’re moving the puck back and forth, stick tape doesn’t make that much of a difference.
The only time stick tape is going to make a difference is when the puck is moving on the stick blade itself, like when you’re making a pass because doing this even if there’s no tape, you’re still going to get the same kind of grip. But if you wanted to move that puck down the rink, you’re going to slide off the duct tape.
Suppose you wanted a toad rag. And do that, it’s going to be much easier to pick that puck up off the ground. If you’ve got the tape, one of the famous moves is Michigan, it just looks impossible without the tape, so I’m about to tape up my stick blade.
Read more: How Do We Measure a Hockey Stick Properly?
The recommended tape for your hockey sticks
To me, I use friction tape, which I like to call cheater tape. It’s just standard black tape, available anywhere. There’s also standard white tape. It’s just double-wide. It’s available anywhere.
I’ve cut off a little piece of it. This is what I use to make the knob on the top. I cut off this little piece, and that’s how I build my knob at the very end of my stick. And I use this only this little tiny piece, so it creates just an endpoint where I know the top of the stick is again.
They are just standard tape. These tapes all of there’s no difference. The color is just the type of dye that they use the tapes identical.
To the double-wide, you end up using less of it. It’s just a marketing gimmick. Whichever one you really want to run.
How to Tape a Hockey Stick ?
I will show you how I tape one of my favorites, friction tape. I start on the heel, and I make sure that the entire heel is covered the reason I start. The heel is actually where a lot of your passing will come from a lot of your shot.
You’re not going to get any benefit by putting a layer of tape if you play roller hockey. It’s going to wear through it just as fast. So you’re better off putting the tape around it the way you like it to be and just dealing with it as I did.
Then, I’ve gone ahead and taped up my stick, and I’ve come to the end part. Where everyone seems to think that there’s only one right way to take the stick, long story short, it doesn’t have to be pretty.
You don’t need to carry scissors in your bag because you can tear it out by yourself. You can get a piece out and do one of these things this part of the tape. It doesn’t need to be pretty.
*Note: You don’t need to have it all nicely tuned and done up and nice. It will get beaten to crap you play hockey, so don’t worry about making it all nice and fancy boom. There so it’s taped up.
So you can see the heel to toe pattern. There’s a lot of rumors out there that this heel to toe pattern affects the way that the puck moves across the tape. That’s just not true. For this puck to manipulate this tape, this puck would have to be pretty intelligent, and this pup is pretty dumb.
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The reason I call this cheater tape is that this tape has a very sticky property to it. It has almost like a flypaper. It just wants to stick to everything. I can practically turn it over with just my stick plane.
With the cheater tape, you can do crazy things like the backhand shot as you’re moving forward, you grab the puck, you slide it forward, you put the heel down, and you move the puck again back. You can also do crazy things like the Michigan toe is up, and it scoops that puck up like that tape.
Summary
That’s all about “How To Tape a Hockey Stick”, how and why we should do it. After reading this article, we hope you can choose for yourself a favorite kind of Hockey stick Tape, and use it wisely. Following us (best tips) for further amazing tips and sharings about Hockey!
