How to Rebound After Giving Up the First Shot

Image Credit: Seth J Sports

Going into any hockey game, particularly as a goalie, you are looking to get into a rhythm. Part of what gives you nerves before the game is having no idea how the game will turn out— that’s what makes playing well and winning so rewarding. You train hard and prepare your best for the game. You hope the game starts off easy, with your team allowing a few wristers from the outside so that you can feel the puck, get your tracking dialed in, and feel good. But sometimes, no matter how hard you prepare or how hard you train, you are going to give up a goal on the first shot of a game. It could be in the first ten minutes, or the first 30 seconds. Either way, your plan for getting into a rhythm immediately evaporates with the ref signaling goal. It’s easy to feel the mental chaos in a time like this, with thoughts like “I guess tonight is not my night.” It can all down spiral from there.

It’s certainly no easy feat to bounce right back from giving up a goal on the first shot of the game. Your mind immediately wants to focus on anything negative it can find. You may find yourself questioning your preparation and your training. You may feel like you just aren’t focused for this game, so you figure it’s probably not going to turn out well for you. But just because it is difficult to rebound from an early goal doesn’t give us an excuse not to. Like almost everything in goaltending, the overarching key to playing a great game after giving up a goal, or even two goals early, is the discipline to redirect your focus to stopping the next shot. “Stopping the next shot” sounds like a simple concept, but it can be broad. What does this actually mean? We’re going to break this down step by step, so that you can immediately bounce back with your best focus, play your best game, and help your team win the next time you find yourself down early.

Accept the Negative Thoughts

“But wait, I thought the whole point is to redirect your focus— why are we accepting negative thoughts?” No matter how disciplined you are, or how elite of an athlete you are, you’re going to have negative thoughts cross your mind. That’s part of being a human being. But if you accept that you are going to have them, that means you are going to be aware of when they arise. And if you are able to recognize negative thoughts when they arise, you can immediately put a stop to them and redirect your thinking.

Stop Digging

It’s an old saying that the best way to get out of a hole is to stop digging. And it’s completely true. Often times, when you are scored on early, your mind jumps to thinking that it just may not be your game, or that you aren’t ready to play. Whether you give up a good goal or a bad goal, what evidence do you have that it’s “just not your game”? None, so don’t convince yourself you’re going to play a bad game, and don’t try to figure out what in your preparation went wrong. That serves you no purpose. You’re going to make mistakes. Everyone will. Just because you make a mistake early does not mean that you aren’t going to be lights out the rest of the game. In fact, it says more about you as a leader and a goalie if you face some adversity at the start of the game, then come back and play your best.

By questioning your preparation, your focus, or your training mid game, you are digging a hole to negativity. Assuming that you have properly taken care of your preparation and training, stop questioning yourself. Do not try to evaluate whether you are as focused as you could be or not, because if you are asking, your mind is always going to want to say “no”. Instead, trust you preparation, no matter how focused you are feeling.

Questioning leads your mind into negativity, and takes away from what is truly important— being ready to stop the next shot.

Forget About Numbers

Everyone wants to have good numbers, whether we act like we care about it or not. Whenever you give up the first shot of a game your save percentage is a whopping 0.0%. Great. It’s easy to focus on what your stats are looking like during the game, but worrying about numbers during the game puts extra pressure on you, and makes it easy to lose focus. If you get scored on again a few shots later, you can make it even worse. If you’ve given up 2 goals on 4 shots, now you have a .50 save percentage, and you may think “well now I have to make 16 more saves in a row to get back up to .900.” 16 saves in a row doesn’t sound like such an easy task when you’ve already given up 2 goals on 4. It can be disheartening, and if you get scored on again within those next 16 shots, you will feel like you failed again and chalk the game up to being a bad game. Or you may think, “Well now I have to hold them off for almost the entire game if I want to have a good game”, and that’s no better, because when you’re 2 minutes into the first period, holding them off for the entire rest of the game sounds like a giant mountain to climb. Focus on the next step, not the mountain.

If you have already decided it’s going to be a bad game for you, then if you end up in a tie game down the stretch with a chance to win, you will have already decided you’ve lost and you won’t be ready to make the big saves when your team needs them.

You can’t make 2, 3, or 16 saves at a time, so don’t make yourself feel like you have to. Instead, focus on the next shot, and on making one save at a time. If you do that, you will string together some saves, and before you know it, you will make 16, 20, or 25 saves in a row. And if you don’t, focus on the next shot anyways. That is the best way to bounce back from giving up the first shot of the game. If you have single minded focus on being ready for the next save, you will end up playing your best game.

Trust That You Will Find a Rhythm

Sometimes, you feel great heading into a game and when you get scored on early, you feel unaffected and like you are still laser focused. That’s great, cherish that.

Often times, when you are scored on early, you feel little off, and like you need to try hard to focus. Be comfortable feeling a bit off in games. You are not going to have your best focus at every moment of every game (but this doesn’t mean you’ll have a bad game). Trust that as the game goes on, you will be able to string some saves together. Once you start stringing some saves together, you will start seeing the puck well, and you will feel like you are in the zone. The tough part is transversing this gap of feeling a bit off to feeling in the zone. The best way to bridge this gap is to make a few saves to get yourself feeling good. And how do you make a few saves in a row? You guessed it— focus on the next one.

There Are Moments That Won’t Go Your Way

Accept it. It’s part of being a goalie. The best goalies have moments that don’t go their way all the time. But what separates the best goalies is how they manage games when they aren’t going their way. Giving up a goal on the first shot of the game is one of these moments. Handle a goal on the first shot no differently than you would a goal midway through the second on the 20th shot. Immediately let it go. Reset. Stay away from negativity, and direct your mind to be laser focused on one thing: stopping the next shot. When you do that, you will find your way into the zone. Don’t try to force your way into it, you can’t force high level focus. Keep your mind positive, and let it relax into the zone so that instinct can take over.

If you do that, you will play the best game you can, and hopefully give your team a chance to win (if they’re at all worth their salt :))—even if you give up the first shot of the game.