Practice Planning and Evaluation for Goalies
Credit: Seth J Sports
In any sport, coaches say that you spend more time practicing than you do actually playing your sport, and it’s completely true. If you add up all the time you spend practicing, training, conditioning, taking care of your body, doing ball drills for hand eye coordination, and more, the sum of that time will equate up to longer than the hours per year you spend in active game time.
Games are easy to evaluate- you know how you played, there’s a scoreboard to show your results, and the highs and lows of winning and losing stick with you longer than any practice. But, since you spend more time in practice than you do playing, wouldn’t it make sense to have a system for practice evaluation too? After all, the work you put into practice will dictate how you play in games. So while practice should be fun, it should also be a time of intense focus on improving your game.
We would like to give you an idea of a basic practice scoring framework you can use for every team practice or goalie session. We would recommend keeping your practice plans and evaluations in a journal, but if you want to type it up, that is ok too. What’s most important is that you do it- so the method of least resistance for you is the best. Like anything, if you are not consistently planning and evaluating practice, then you will not improve as fast as you possibly can. Here is our recommendation for a general practice planning framework.
What Are 3 Things I Need to Improve?
Most of us know what we need to work on to improve our game, or what we may need to work on based on the outcome of our last game. If you don’t know what you need to improve, ask your goalie coach, or get in contact with a goalie coach you can ask. Either way, figure out what it is and write down the 3 things you want to improve. Here is an example:
Speed- I have good technique, but I need to be able to add speed to that technique.
Maintaining high thighs in my butterfly- not sitting down.
Transition into my RVH from my feet- setting myself up in a position to push.
Once you have those written down, you can write down an action plan or system to improve each one.
2. Improvement Plan
Now that you have specified what you need to work on, it’s time to make a plan for how you are going to work on those skills. Write down specific action steps you will take to improve those parts of your game. Referring to the example above, your improvement plan for practice could look like this:
Do 10 minutes of speed drills at the beginning of practice while the team is working on skating.
Focus on maintaining high thighs in my butterfly when I drop into my butterfly to make a save, and do 5 good butterfly reps at a time while I have periods of rest.
Do 5 RVH transition reps on each side when the team is working on something at the other end/between reps/ when I have some rest time.
Notice that this plan is actionable and measurable- you know exactly what you need to, and you know whether or not you did it. There is no grey area or room to wonder whether you executed your plan for improvement.
These two steps should be done pre practice. Next is the post practice evaluation.
3. Evaluate Your Practice
Sometime after practice, take a few minutes to evaluate your practice. The first thing you want to look at is whether you worked your improvement plan or not. If you did, great. If you didn’t, evaluate why you didn’t, so that next time you can plan better.
Then, you want to score yourself in four or five different categories. Some we would recommend would be skating, speed, hands, post play, positioning, tracking, positivity, mental toughness or reset, etc. You can score yourself on the skills you put into your improvement plan for that practice. Whatever you feel works best for you. Whichever categories you choose, you want to be sure that you give yourself a score of 1 through 10. This is because when you give yourself a specific score, you are specifically measuring how you executed each category. This way, you can track if these categories were good in practice and are improving, were bad and are declining, or if they were average and are staying the same. If you don’t give yourself a specific metric, it’s much more difficult to track progress or effort for various skills.
When you are evaluating yourself with a specific 1-10 score, do so with your ability in mind. Do not compare yourself to NHL goalies or someone else when measuring your performance. So if you know you can move at a certain speed, but you slacked off and you moved around slowly during practice, give yourself a 4 or a 5. If you felt you moved at the best of your ability, and you even improved, give yourself a 10 in the movement category for practice that day.
4. What Did You Do Well?
Write down at least three things that you did well in practice. Whether it’s a practice or a game, no matter how bad it was, if you were trying your best and working your hardest, then that means you did something well. Acknowledging what you did well gives you something to build on, even if you didn’t get the outcome you wanted. It can be something as simple as the fact that you worked your hardest, or you let negative things go and immediately reset for the next rep.
5. What Do I Want to Work On Next Practice?
Now that you have evaluated your practice, write down the three things you want to work on next practice. Once you do that, begin this process all over again, and repeat it for each practice going forward.
Even just a quick 5 minutes of practice planning and evaluation before and after each ice session will make a big difference in your focus and execution, and therefore, your rate of improvement going forward.
