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How Women’s Lacrosse Goalies Can Stop More Off-Stick Hip Shots
Bullets and Timestamps:
[00:00:22] Coach Mike asks how female lacrosse goalies improve off-stick hip shots
[00:00:40] No 50/50 goal tending
[00:01:00] Stepping to off-stick side
[00:01:21] Fun drill to empower goalies
[00:02:38] You can’t win them all
[00:03:04] Final recommendation on stepping to off-stick side
Coach Edwards here again. Part two of Coach Mike from Connecticut’s question. Part one was how does a female lacrosse goalie do better at low shots, and the second part is how do they get better at weak side hip shots? Great question. First and foremost, your goalies should not be standing directly in the middle of the cage. It’s what we call 50/50 goalie tending. We don’t want any 50/50 goalie tending. We want goalies whoare just a baby step to their off-stick side.
If you think about it, because we have our stick on one side of our body, we’re taking up a lot of net on our stick side. It doesn’t make sense for our positioning to be right in the middle of the cage because it makes it actually doubly as hard to get to that off stick side. So take a baby step to your off stick side, that’s one. And what that’ll do is that will give less net for the shooter to hit on the off stick side and it will also give the goalie more chance to stop the ball on the stick side, because that’s where we’re strongest. Now, here’s something to do to have fun with this one.
In warm up have your goalies step all the way to their off-stick side. What I mean by that is have them on the goal line and have them put their off-stick foot on the pipe. Now what this does effectively is it eliminates any space for a shooter to shoot at on their off-stick side, but what it is isa bit of a game. It makes the goalie proactive. Goalie’s basically saying, “Hey listen, I know I’m giving you all of my stick side. I want you to beat me there. We’re going to race. You’re going to race to shoot the ball to the goal line, I’m going to race to get my stick in front of that ball before it hits the goal line.”
What I find this does is it really empowers your goalies, and especially women’s lacrosse goalies because they’re getting shot on by especially penalty shots, especially with that eight yard, eight meter shot, depending on how you look at it. I see a lot of women’s goalies just standing straight up in the cage. Whereas, if they just take a step to their left, their off-stick and say, “Listen, you beat me there, I’m going to try to beat you there.” they’re going to make a lot of saves.
The truth is there are times where we cannot move fast enough to an off-stick hip shot if all we’re trying to do is get our stick head on it. Now, if we try to get our bottom hand on it, we’ve got a better chance of making a save almost like a hockey goalie, a lot of people don’t talk about this but that’s the truth. One of the ways to really remedy this is to have your goalies take a half step or more to their off-stick side, give up more to their stick side, that’s where they’re strongest, and see where they go from there. I guarantee you your goalies will feel more empowered by doing this and they’ll have a lot of fun, especially if you’re warming them up in practice.
So Coach Mike, good luck with that, let me know how your goalies do. And if you have any more questions, please email me at jonathan@inseasonhome.comand check out the new LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com coming up soon and become a member and we can do more of these coaching tips on a daily basis. Cheers.
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