Coach Edwards goes into detail about the drastic difference it can make in a lacrosse goalie’s game if they use more protective gear and practice in the cage without using their sticks. He gives tips on how goalies can practice to really improve can feel comfortable enough to make dramatic saves.
0:23 – World Lacrosse Championships were awesome – more to come on those.
1:47 – Are goalies ready to get in the cage and drop their sticks?
2:08 – Calf pain resonates, it’s worth protecting your shins.
2:44 – Peer pressure can leave lacrosse goalies vulnerable to injury.
3:22 – Young goalies who try to look like their MLL heroes are on different levels with accuracy.
4:48 – Coach Edwards’ advice on how to completely change your game.
Introduction
Hey guys, Coach Edwards here at LacrosseGoalieTips.com and LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com, and today I’ve got on my Belgium Lacrosse sweatshirt. That was given to me by Tibor Van den Wildenbergh. Tibor, hello, and all the guys from Belgium, I really appreciate it.
The World Lacrosse Championships
I got a chance to see these guys play down in Denver at the World Lacrosse Championships this past summer, and I still haven’t done a post about my trip or my comments or posted videos of all the goalies that I met down there. It was just awesome. It was really cool to see the reach of the blog, and goalies from all over the world. That was really, really inspiring.
Looking Good Is A Goalies Last Concern
So today I want to talk about a comment that I got on last week’s post about equipment. This post comes from Colton. If you guys want to head back and check out the comment from Colton, I’d appreciate it. This is awesome. Colton writes,
Coach,
I’m a goalie from a small town in Colorado, and when you said to hop in the goal with no stick I got a little smile on my face. All four years of high school I was confident in my goal. I’d stop everything no matter what I had to do, and I think the reason for that was me hopping in the goal once a month without my stick. Once I started playing college ball, I stopped doing that and became more worried about looking good.
Like you hypothesized, the amount of saves I made dwindled, so I have to say that I believe you are 100% correct. It’s about being safe to make the save. I’ll have to try slipping in there with a hockey chest protector in the next few days and trying that out. Thanks for continuing to post and continuing to want future goalies to do great things.
Colton, thanks a lot.
1:47 Can You Handle Dropping Your Stick During Warm Up?
In that post I made a comment about something I do with goalies when I first get them in the cage. I put them in the cage and say, “Now drop your stick. We’re going to go through a warmup without the stick, a full blown warm up.” Stick-side high, offstick high, stick-side low, offstick low – would they make the save? Because the question is, would you?
2:08 Calf and Shin Protection
We see college goalies and ML goalies making kick saves with no padding, and you see an occasional goalie with a pad on – usually their offstick calf or their offstick shin because they’ve kicked out that offstick leg to make a save and they haven’t been able to get a stick all the way down there to get on the ball. So they end up taking a shot off the fleshy part of their calf. I swear, getting hit off the calf was the worst pain I think I’ve felt and it took forever to heal. Every time you stepped, you’d go to class the next day and you’d feel it.
2:44 Peer Pressure Leaves Goalies Unsafe
The bottom line here is just being protected. What Colton touches on here is something pretty interesting. It’s that reality that we lose the equipment we wear as we get older based on peer pressure, on how we’re supposed to look. I really feel that the lacrosse goalie is confused. We’re stuck in a transitional period where the lacrosse goalie is dressed less than a field player in a lot of instances. Yet they’re getting shots that are faster than a hockey puck, typically, and hockey goalies wear way more equipment.
3:22 Young Goalies Want To Look Cool
A hockey goalie has evolved into a blocker and a deflector. I recently started playing some hockey goal and I hadn’t done it in like, 18 years. I put on the equipment again and it was really interesting because it taught me a lot. It’s something that I wish every lacrosse goalie could get a taste of. What ends up happening is we, especially with young goalies, junior goalies even before junior high school, put them in the cage, we put them in the chest protector because they look just like their MLL counterpart. They want to look like their hero.
3:54 The Problem With Looking Like Your MLL Hero
The problem is there’s a difference between the shot against a young goalie that’s shot and the MLL college goalie. The accuracy is completely different. You need to decide here what you need to wear for equipment, and as Colton said, you’ve got to remind yourself every once in a while and test yourself by dropping that stick and making those saves.You don’t want to be shot on by your coach shooting at like 75-80 MPH plus if you’ve never done it before. You’re just going to get injured. But I guarantee you this. If you drop the stick, take the stick out of the warm up, and you work on bounce shots and you work on getting in front of the ball…I’m going to try to post a video below this of one of my favorite movie clips from Major League, you’ll see it tomorrow.
4:48 How To Completely Change Your Game
Get in the cage. Work on stopping the ball without the stick, and do what I call, “Get ugly.” These aren’t going to be pretty saves. Get a bucket of balls with your buddy, or your coach, or someone you trust, and get shot on. Try to make saves with your body only and see what that feels like.
Here’s a better thing. Go out there and do that warm up and go get some baseball catcher’s equipment. Go get some shin guards. Get some football pants or some hockey pants so that you can just throw them on and work on getting in front of the ball and making that save with your body. Catching a ball with your chest, not your hands. Catch it with your chest. Working on things like that can totally change your game.
Conclusion
Colton from Colorado, I really appreciate you leaving a comment below the post. Don’t be shy, people. Leave me a comment below. Go back to see Colton’s comment and leave a comment below. Let me know what you’ve done to improve your game by testing out more equipment, less equipment, making saves without your stick, getting ugly. It’s awesome and it will totally change your game. Give it a shot. I’m Coach Edwards from LacrosseGoalieTips.com. I thank you, as always, for checking me out and reading these posts, and I always appreciate you leaving comments below or facebooking it, sharing, tweeting, liking, Google Plusing, all that good stuff. I really appreciate it and I’ll talk to you real soon.
Cheers.
Hi coach Edwards my new select team recently had a preseason tournament in which the games were extremely tight and the coach played the same goalie for every game except for a half when we were beating them 10-0 and they had 1 shot on target i then played that half and had 9 shots on target and I let one goal in. The game before he came right up to me when I asked will the goalies switch and he said directly “I don’t trust you with the game so close.” So he kept in the other goalie who he had coached before with the travel team it really annoyed me and I don’t know what to do especially since it is the offseason and out practices earlier he didn’t pay attention to the goalies and during the defense drills we had no shots. It also was annoying that the goalie didn’t communicate at all and left the defense lost and he didn’t care that I’m more communicative. What can I do in the offseason to get his attention
Ryan hey there. These stories really bother me and I’m sorry you had an experience like this. Now I don’t know the entire situation but here are a couple of things to think about:
1) When travel teams play tournaments the coaches are usually under a lot of stress to make it through to the playoffs and then as far to the finals as possible. Families pay a lot of money and no one wants to go home early. I have experienced this as a coach and it’s not fun. I remember coaching a team in San Diego a few years ago. We had a game (I think it was our third game) that was a must win. I warned the parents of the youngest kids that they wouldn’t see much time. One set of parents was good with that, the other not so much. We ended up winning but it never sits well with anyone.
2) The feedback to you was harsh but not overly productive. The question that should come after “I don’t trust you.” is, “I appreciate that Coach. Can we sit down and talk about what parts of my game need improvement and how can we work on that so you are more confident in me?” Coaching that basically boils down to saying “You suck” is not productive and coaches who use that should be replaced. As an athlete your family is investing money so you can get better. So make the coach help you get better. It’s not personal. It’s business.
3) Many coaches, like me, who have been around the sport of lacrosse for a long time will all agree that we aren’t really keen on where the game is going. Lacrosse has now gone the way of AAU basketball. High School ball is almost an afterthought to tourney after tourney and recruiting event after recruiting event. These events in the Pre-season are not “pre-season” games. They are competitions. In the old days we used to have these things called “scrimmages” where teams could work on stuff and kids could actually try things out and improve. Coaches actually “coached” and kids got better. They didn’t sit on the bench and wonder “Why aren’t I playing?”
A coach gives you a plan. When I sit kids during a game they get serious feedback from me. Coaching cues like, “Hey, you’re doing awesome and you’re passing is getting better, but I’m worried you are going to get run over in this game and injured.” Or, for a goalie, “Right now your clearing is vastly improved but I’m worried we are going to give up too many shots inside nine yards and your save percentage on those shots just isn’t there right now. Because of that I’m going to go with Goalie A because I think he gives us a better chance of keeping the game close.”
Because everyone wants to get “seen” and get good footage for their recruiting tape, or because people want to make all-star teams at every tournament, the art of coaching is lost on a lot of coaches.
4) All that being said, coaches do the best with what they know. I don’t know you’re coach, but if he’s a college kid who was really good in college that doesn’t mean he’s a great coach. He obviously doesn’t value communication. Heck he might not even know how to teach it. Which is a shame.
Coaching is a multi-disciplinary skill set that can be acquired just by being a great player. Great players sometimes don’t even know why they are good. And therefore they can’t help an aspiring athlete who has weaknesses other than saying, “You’re slow.”
As a coach I end up with what’s called “compassion fatigue.” Nurses and Doctors get it in hospitals. They see all these people who need their help and they can’t get to them all. Sometimes they lose a couple.
I feel like that when I coach. Ryan I can guarantee you that if I were your coach I would be giving you some serious feedback on your game. It’s what I do with our LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com coaching clients. Honest feedback on how you can improve. No feelings hurt. Just facts. That’s what we want anyway.
Listen, get with that coach. Sit down with him off the field when he can focus. Pressure him. Ask him, “What am I not doing right now that you see that other goalie is doing? How can I improve that?” If he can’t help you, run. Run away. He may not be able to make you better, he just might know where you are weak.
Then follow up and ask him about the communication and the lost defense.
But here’s the deal…don’t put him in a position where he feels threatened or challenged. Some coaches don’t know everything. But it takes a real Coach to talk to his athlete and find a solution.
Let’s say your coach is an attackman and has no idea about goalie communication. That can be a problem not just for you but the whole team. It takes a lot of skill to coach a bunch of high school players and he might lack all of those skills. But assure him that you can impress him if he gives you good feedback and you can work together.
Ryan that should shed some light for you on why and how that went down. Please feel free to post some more here below. If there are any other coaches or parents who are reading this and you’d like to chip in please leave your comments below.
Thanks for the great question Ryan. All the best buddy!
Coach Edwards
Nice sweatshirt ! 🙂
Oh yeah! Great logo on that sweatshirt too. Here’s a lacrosse quiz: what does the Belgian lacrosse logo represent?
Haha, not really a hard question for me, i play for team Belgium 😀 (The Atomium btw)
Hi Coach Edwards,
I have some interesting thoughts to pass along from a hockey goalie coach (Brian Daccord, of Stop It Goaltending) on these issues: first of all, whether any of the coaches has ever played goal, it is a good idea to assign one of the assistant coaches to be responsible for the goalies. That coach would have direct communication to the goalies during practice (lest they go unspoken-to for nearly an entire practice), and to take shots on them while the rest of the team is working on plays that don’t involve the goalies, so at no time are they just standing around.
And as for who gets to play in net, Brian suggests that it be laid out at the very beginning of the season, whatever the coach’s philosophy is (shared time, alternating games, merit system.)
I can only pass along credit for these ideas, since I heard them at one of Brian’s talks to hockey coaches; but it seems pretty reasonable that most of it would apply to lax as well.
Regards,
Robert Buonfiglio
Eye on Performance Sports Vision Training
Thanks for the comments Robert. Brian has a great hockey goalie book out as well. Highly recommended. Until my book for Lacrosse Goalies is out this year!
I’ll have to look out for that one! We have worked with many lacrosse goalies, including pre-season camps by lax-school.com for the past few years. I find lax goaltending to be one of the most fascinating positions in all of sports, as a vision trainer. It’s pretty significant that a top hockey goalie will have a save % in the nineties, while a top lax goalie will be in the sixties. A very different challenge, with all the possible launch points of a shot. And though I knew nothing about lacrosse growing up, I became a fan when my son started playing, and I really enjoy watching the games!
Hey Coach Edwards, Sulton again. I’ve been hearing about a lot of changes in the form and play style that a goalie should take (Lateral vs Arc) I personally play both depending on the situation. I have a short video of me playing and I want to know am I actually making good saves or getting lucky and I also want you to point out the flaws in my form/positioning although I feel that there’s a lot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdZHO-cxn6I
DANNG! Your good!
Hey Coach Edwards, just a quick question. Do you recommend any brands of baseball catchers equipment over others? Who should I trust?