What Is Off-Ice Testing for Youth Hockey? A Parent's Guide to the Numbers

Off-ice testing is a set of standardized physical tests, done off the ice, that measure the athletic qualities that support hockey performance: leg power, speed, agility, and grip strength. Coaches use tests like the vertical jump, broad jump, short sprints, and lateral agility drills because they relate to skating ability and other on-ice movement skills, even though the test itself never touches a rink (relationship between off-ice testing and on-ice performance in youth hockey players).

It is not a tryout, and it is not a ranking of who is better. It is a measurement day, a snapshot of where an athlete's physical qualities sit right now, and a data point to compare against next time.

Facilities and hockey associations run testing days for a similar reason a school runs a fitness assessment: not to embarrass anyone, but to build a baseline. Once there is a baseline, every future test tells a story about progress instead of standing alone as an isolated number.

None of these tests measure hockey sense, compete level, or how a kid reads the play. They measure the physical qualities that support those skills.

Facilities also vary in exactly which tests they run and how they run them, so treat the list above as the common core rather than a fixed standard. What matters most is that the same facility uses the same protocol every time, so a comparison between test days is measuring the athlete, not a change in method.

The first question we hear from parents at almost every testing day is some version of how does my kid compare to others. A raw number, an 18 inch vertical jump for example, means very little on its own. What makes it useful is comparing it to other athletes of the same age and sex, which is what a percentile does. If a child's jump lands in the 60th percentile for their age group, it means they jumped higher than roughly 60 percent of athletes in that comparison group, not that they are somehow 60 percent good at hockey.

This is the same logic doctors use on a pediatric growth chart: percentiles describe where a measurement sits within a population, and there is no single correct percentile to land on (HealthyChildren.org). A 40th percentile result is not a problem to fix. It is one data point.

Age-cohort comparisons matter here because kids develop at very different rates. Two twelve-year-olds can be nearly two years apart in biological maturity, which shows up directly in jump height and sprint speed. Comparing a late-developing athlete's raw number to an early-developing teammate's, without accounting for that, tells you almost nothing useful.

A single testing session captures a lot of noise: how much sleep an athlete got, whether they are mid growth spurt, how recently they trained, even how nervous they were in front of a stopwatch. That is normal, and it is exactly why the number from one day matters less than the trend across several.

Sport-science guidance generally points to retesting a few times a year rather than constantly, often tied to the start and end of a training block or season, so real gains have time to show up (NSCA testing and profiling guidance). A jump that moves from the 40th percentile to the 55th over a season tells you far more than either number alone.

Every year, draft coverage shows NHL prospects running the bench press, VO2 max test, and vertical jump at the NHL Scouting Combine. It is tempting to picture youth testing the same way, but the two are built for different purposes.

The NHL Combine evaluates draft-eligible players against professional benchmarks, using lab equipment like force plates and metabolic carts, to help rank prospects for all 30 NHL teams (Topend Sports, NHL Draft Combine). Youth off-ice testing uses simpler field tests, compares a child against their own age group rather than professional standards, and exists to track development over time, not to rank draft stock. A 12-year-old's numbers were never meant to be read against an 18-year-old draft prospect's, and treating them that way misreads what the test is for.

For anxious hockey parents, the comparison is worth naming plainly: your child's vertical jump next to an NHL Combine number online is not a useful comparison, and it was never meant to be one. The two tests exist at completely different levels of the sport, for completely different reasons.

Testing numbers are most useful as a coaching input, not a parent scoreboard. A coach uses them to individualize training - a low broad jump relative to vertical jump might point toward more horizontal power work, for example. What the results tell the coach about the next training block matters more than how the athlete ranked that day. If your family is heading into tryout season, our guide to Ontario tryout prep covers how testing trends fit into that picture. And if strength training is part of the plan to move those numbers, see our age-by-age guide to youth strength training. If the growth-plate worry is what is holding your family back from that conversation, our piece on whether lifting actually affects growth addresses it directly.

Coaches and facility staff running their own testing days may also find our companion piece on running a youth athlete testing day useful for the operational side.

Off-ice testing measures physical qualities that support hockey, power, speed, agility, and grip, and compares them to same-age peers through percentiles. It is a snapshot, not a verdict, and it is most useful as a trend across multiple sessions rather than a single score.

The parents who get the most out of testing days treat them the way a coach does: as information that shapes the next block of training, not as a report card to react to emotionally. For the full picture on how testing and tracking work, see our guide to understanding athlete testing.

Testing measures physical performance, not medical status. If you have concerns about your child's physical development or an injury, talk to their doctor.