Why That Division 1 Lacrosse Goalie Can’t Coach Your Goalie

Hey it’s Coach Edward here with LacrosseGoalieTips.com and LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com. I got a question this week. So first and foremost I apologize. No blue sweater today. Just wanted to whip off a video real quick. Didn’t have the blue sweater. I got an e-mail from a lacrosse coach on the East Coast with a question about his son who is only a fourth grader. So a young goalie but a goalie that gets called up and gets a chance to play with a club team that has a Division One All-American lacrosse goalie who’s going to be the goalie coach of this team. This club team sounds great, right. Well unfortunately this goalie is having a challenge. Now the dad, who was a lacrosse goalie, who’s been following my website for years and has been, been teaching what I teach to his son. Things are going really well. Gets with his division one lacrosse goalie and now things are going downhill. So what gives? What’s the deal, right?

What Makes A Great Lacrosse Goalie Coach?

[00:01:25] Well, the question that I wanted to discuss today is, “What makes a great lacrosse goalie coach? I’m a little biased because I feel like I’m pretty good at this. I’ve been doing this for a long time. And what I really pride myself in, is the fact that, I am really good at taking goalies who are not necessarily gifted, or athletes in general who are not necessarily gifted, and helping them get better because I was not naturally gifted as an athlete.

Don’t Fall In Love With Their Success As a Goalie

[00:01:57] So the first thing that happens is that we don’t want to fall in love with the hype of a goalie. And what I mean by that is, that the misconception is, that people think that if someone is a great athlete or has great success in a position, that they should be a good coach in that position. So if a kid’s a good lacrosse goalie they should be a good coach of lacrosse goalies and that’s not true. And a lot of times the opposite is true. They’re actually the worst person for that position.

I actually wrote about this in my book An Athlete’s Guide To Winning In Sports and Life, which is on Amazon. You know, I’ve seen this happen in multiple sports where an athlete has, a good athlete gets to become a coach usually because it’s just the easy thing to do. It’s like, “Hey we’re running a camp, a clinic. Can you come down ? And they find at that point that, you know, those coaches they look at athletes and they don’t understand why I don’t “get it”. And that’s the worst thing a coach can be is when they look at athletes and they go, “Oh wait you don’t understand? You’re not good at this? I don’t get it.”.

A Great Goalie Coach Needs To Understand “Progression”

[00:03:10] So what makes a good lacrosse coach or lacrosse goalie coach in this case is one, they need to understand progression. Now what’s progression? Progression is this. If I take a five pound weight and I put it on your foot. No problem. Right? But if I take a five pound plate and I drop it on your foot, that’s a problem.[00:03:34] Now the same thing happens when we’re teaching lacrosse goalies. We take a goalie, a young goalie, who’s shows some talent and we get them to play up. And when they play up they get shot on by shots they’ve never seen before at speeds they’ve never seen before, and they get hurt. And now that confidence that they’ve built is now shattered and now we’re rebuilding confidence. When we didn’t have to do that before because the coach that the athlete didn’t understand progression.[00:04:06] The Number One question that I tend to answer on this website on this blog is, “What do I do in drills or if I have a fear of the ball…” It all comes down to progression.[00:04:18] I believe everybody can be a good athlete. I really believe that! Because I didn’t believe in myself but with good progression I went on to do some amazing things. And I know that you can too.

It Doesn’t Matter If The Lacrosse Goalie Is Male of Female

[00:04:32] So as a coach you put a kid in the cage, male, female, it doesn’t matter. We’re trying to get them to see the ball, know where it’s going and then move to it. So things need to happen in that time if balls are coming from too close and an athlete’s fearful. Well guess what? They’re not going to see it,and know it, and then move to it because they are going to be afraid of it.[00:04:53] But if we slow things down. We back up the shooter. If we use tennis balls. If we pad up the goalie. Then we put a goalie in a state where, progressively, they have less fear, they can learn how to move. And then we get to step two.

A Great Lacrosse Coach Needs To Understand Physical Literacy

[00:05:11] Which is a great lacrosse coach needs to understand strength and conditioning or physical literacy. Mobility. Things like that. Because what happens is you can put pretty much anybody in the cage, and if you put them behind a glass wall where they felt 100 percent safe, they’d be able to see the ball. Right? So they’d be able to do step 1. And then after a while…Step 2, they would know where the ball is going. Especially if they had enough time to react to it. That’s someone who’s never done lacrosse in their life. They could be an accountant in a high rise somewhere. You put them behind a glass wall. They get shot on. They’re probably going have a good chance of seeing it and knowing where it’s going to go after a while.[00:05:50] The trick is moving to it, and this is a big deal. Because what happens, a lot of time especially with young or new goalies, is physically they’re not able to explode in front of the ball, yet.[00:06:01] So what happens is you take that goalie and you shoot on them and they get scored on what happens? They get down. They get depressed they get bummed out because they go like, “Oh, I suck!” Right?

A Great Lacrosse Coach Avoids “Light Switch” Mentality

[00:06:12] If I save the ball, good. I don’t save the ball, bad. Really bad. Like a light switch mentality. Is what I call that. So a great lacrosse goalie coach understands physical literacy and mobility. Well, OK. “Did you see that ball?” Yes or no. “Yes? Great.”.[00:06:27] “Did you know where it was going?” Yes. Great.[00:06:30] “Did you move to it?” Yeah, but really slow, or not at all. Well that’s where now we’ve got to understand, well why did that happen? And I can look at a lacrosse goalie really quickly and I go, “You know what, your hips are weak.” Or your hamstrings are tight. Or whatever, any number of things that restrict the goalie from being able to make that save.[00:06:49] So a great lacrosse goalie coach knows hey, smart kid, saw the ball knew where it was going. Can’t move to it yet. So we’ve got it, again, go back to progression. Move those shooters back when we can at practice. And then when we get the kid in the game, we need to be really, really progressive at how we look at winning and losing.

A Great Goalie Coach Is Very Sophisticated With How They View Winning And Losing

[00:07:13] Here’s what I mean by that. So step number three for being a great lacrosse goalie coach is being more sophisticated when it comes to winning and losing. So a great lacrosse goalie looks at their save percentage as their grade for their game. Not the scoreboard. OK.[00:07:29] Because if you go out you lose today ten to eight. But you had 40 shots and you made an insane amount of saves. That’s a great day for you. But if you go out and you have a bad game. If you go out you lose two to one and you don’t stop anything, that’s a bad day. Right? So we’ve we’ve got to look progressively and help the goalie understand. All right, here’s how you really did today. OK.[00:07:53] That save. All those goals that went in? Those ten goals, 15 goals, eight goals, whatever it is. Right, on goal 1, you did this well, you didn’t do this well. Great. Let’s learn from that. Right. So that’s the third thing is we’ve got to take a lacrosse goalie and help them be sophisticated in how they look at their own game. And from there we move forward.

A Great Lacrosse Goalie Coach Doesn’t Blow Things Up

[00:08:14] The fourth thing that makes a great lacrosse goalie coach is to first, maintain what is working, and then look to improve. So we need to first maintain what’s working. So if a kid comes to you and they’ve been working with a dad or a mom or another coach, you don’t quickly just change it. You don’t look at them and go, “Hey you know, I’ve seen a lot of lacrosse goalies where I was like, “You’ve been doing what in practice?” Right? So it’s easy to go like, oh my God, this horrible. Change that. We’re going to do this.[00:08:45] But what you need to do is go listen, that’s what working for you? Awesome. We’re going to continue with that for a little bit. Great. So now a great lacrosse goalie coach develops rapport with that goalie. Because now, the first thing to do is we need to come to a goalie and we need to keep them entertained. We need to keep them involved. We need to keep them excited about playing, right?

Entertain. Edu-tain. Educate

[00:09:05] And then over time, once we’ve entertained them a little bit. Now we’ve got the time to, what I call, “edu-tain”. So we’re going to sneak in a little bit of new stuff. Hey let’s try this. Let’s try this for you. All right, see how that goes.[00:09:20] Does that work? Great. Keep going. Didn’t work? Hmmm. Now that’s where, as a coach I got to understand, this training technique or tip or whatever that I’ve used in the past has worked with other goalies. Why isn’t it working with this one? What am I saying that’s not clicking, or clicking here. Or maybe it’s not a good tip for this goalie. So I’m not going to use it then![00:09:47] So a great lacrosse goalie helps, a great lacrosse goalie coach, helps a lacrosse goalie improve, hopefully a steady state. It’s never always going to be that way. You going to have peaks and valleys. That’s cool. All right. But a lacrosse goalie coach’s job is to not just throw out what you’ve been doing and say, “Here you’re going to do this.” Because that’s stupid.

A Great Coach Needs To Know All Coaching Tactics.  Not Just Worked For Him/Her

[00:10:11] To think that, as a lacrosse coach, my goal is not to come to you and say, “Do this and only this.” Because you may come and say you know you play really well with, you know, pasta hanging off your face mask and that distracts you enough, and makes you not think about, like you know, something else. Whatever. I’m just trying to distract you. You understand what I mean.[00:10:39] My job is not to quickly throw it out. So I’ve got to be really careful about it as lacrosse coach. You’ve got to be sophisticated. And then you’ve got to be progressive in how you coach. All right.[00:10:49] So I hear stories every year of kids who meet a lacrosse goalie coach somewhere, and they just blow them up. And that’s really unfortunate especially if it’s a young kid has been a goalie for a long time and has loved it and now all of a sudden they don’t want to play anymore. And that’s not cool.

What Are Your Keys To Having/Being a Great Lacrosse Goalie Coach?

[00:11:07] So those are my kind of four big keys to being a great lacrosse goalie coach. Let me know what your keys are. Leave me a comment below and send me an email at coachedwards@lacrossegoalieuniversity.com[00:11:20] And hey listen lacrosse season is here. It’s coming. If you’re not a member of LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com, check it out. All right. I’m in there and I’m available to you on a on a one on one basis.

Grab A Copy Of My Book

[00:11:32] And if you haven’t headed over to Amazon yet I released my book An Athlete’s Guide To Winning In Sports and Life. And so if you are an athlete, or you know of an athlete who’s got big dreams and wants to kind of take their sport to the next level, you really need to copy this book. It’s not a sports psychology book, although there are some sports like in there. It’s really a philosophy to adopt as an athlete that I know works really well because it worked for me. Someone who wasn’t a gifted athlete and who went on to become an Olympian in one sport a Division 1 recruit in lacrosse and almost Olympian, almost on the path in a different sport. So so check it out and if you get question me email coachedwards@lacrossegoalieuniversity.com See you soon.[00:12:23] I want to tell you about my new book an athletes guide to winning in sports and life. I spent a long time on this, but this is 25 years of coaching knowledge basically packed into a book. So whether you’re a lacrosse goalie watching this or a parent or coach, or you know of an athlete who’s got big dreams, and you know parents and coaches who are supporting that athlete, then this is the book. I wrote this book for those types of people for athletes who are motivated who really want to make something happen. Whether they’re trying to make the J.V. or the varsity at high school or they’ve got dreams to play college, professionally, or go on the Olympics. I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with athletes from a variety of sports who’ve gone on to big success. We’re talking Division 1 2 3. MCLA Divison one Division two. The Olympics some have gone on to play professionally. I’ve distilled everything I know from what I’ve learned from some of the best coaches on the planet into this book.

#1 In Sports Psychology

[00:13:20] And so when we launch his book on Amazon it was great. Real quickly we spiked up to number one in the sports psychology section as well as the coaching section. And I want you to grab a copy. So what am I. Do you watch this video and you’re a lacrosse goalie. I want you to head on over to my Web site LacrosseGoalieTips.com, and we’re going to basically do an offer. This year, if you join LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com. You’re going to get the book for free.[00:13:46] And so basically what you do join LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com for a month. You’re actually going to get the book for less than what what we sell it for online. And but I know that once you get the book you’re going to love it and you want to be part of it and you’re going to be inside LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com where you’re going to have access to me and hours and hours worth of coaching footage for lacrosse goalies, parents, coaches specifically. All right, so special deal, just from my lacrosse goalie audience and the people who subscribe to my newsletter, and who are seeing this video on YouTube.[00:14:16] So subscribe to LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com the link will be below. Get a copy of the book for free. The book retails for 25 bucks. So you get a sweet deal on that and I’m looking forward to getting to know you better. So grab a copy today. Click the link below and I’ll see on the other side. Cheers.