Summer Training as a Youth Goalie

May 24

Although summer hasn’t begun yet, many goalies have already completed tryouts, and have found out which team they are playing for this upcoming season. Now it’s time to spend the offseason preparing for the next campaign beginning in the fall. Some young goalies may not be sure what they can be doing in the offseason to best prepare themselves to play at a high level once the next season starts. The tricky goal with offseason training is that you want to improve your game without wearing yourself down. If you begin your new season already feeling sick and tired of hockey, then you won’t perform your best. We’ve compiled a list of ways that you can improve your game while also feeling eager for the season to start so that when it does, you will be excited to be playing hockey again, and you will feel healthy, refreshed, and energized as you embark on the next chapter of your career.

Some of these offseason tips may seem obvious, and some may not, but they all have their place in making you a better goaltender.

Take Time Off

Whether you have just recently completed tryouts, or they aren’t until the fall, taking a little extra time off to be away from the ice will do wonders you. Obviously, we all have room to improve. We all have things that we need to practice. But if you are on the ice all the time all summer, you will wear yourself down, and you may get sick of hockey. You also won’t allow your body to fully recover from all the wear and tear from the previous season. Recovery is obviously important for being ready to give your all again next season.

You need time to recover mentally as well. Playing goalie is no easy task on your focus or your emotions. You need to allow some time for both to be feeling good before you get back onto the ice for a new season.

If you allow for some time off, then you will approach your ice sessions during the offseason with excitement and focus, and you will improve faster. And when it’s time to step on the ice for your next season, you will be excited play, and you will play your best.

So go on vacation. Hang out with friends. Spend time on other hobbies or interests you have.

We recommend taking a couple months off from being on the ice more than an hour or two per week over the summer. If you are enjoying being on the ice for those couple hours, then great, keep doing it. If you aren’t, then back off a little bit and work on other things you enjoy.

Once your season gets closer, like 4-8 weeks away, then you can start going on the ice more consistently, or 3-4 hours per week.

Be an Athlete

Don’t only be a hockey player. Play other sports. These can be organized team sports, or just sports on your own or with friends. Playing other sports serves two purposes: one, you get to focus on something other than hockey, so you feel mentally refreshed and excited when you get on the ice. And two, playing other sports actually makes you a better goaltender. Goaltending movements are very specific for your body. When you are only playing goalie all the time, you’re not training your body to move in other ways, or forcing your body to be coordinated in other ways besides just being a goalie. When you practice and play other sports, you are making yourself a better athlete, which makes you a better goalie. You will be better at executing the movements specific to playing goalie when you are on the ice if you are playing other sports away from the ice.

Some of our favorite sports to play in the summer that we believe translate well to goaltending are baseball, tennis, racquetball, and pickelball. You will notice that these sports all combine lateral foot speed with hand eye coordination at the same time. Sounds pretty similar to goaltending, doesn’t it??

Ball Drills

Ball drills don’t require much besides some sort of bouncy sports ball and a flat wall. That’s what’s nice about them. Throwing a ball off the wall, watching it intently, and catching it improves tracking and hand eye coordination. You don’t have to do them for very long, only about 15 minutes or less a day or three times per week to see improvement.

Our favorite balls to use are racquetballs, because they are smaller and they bounce faster, mimicking a speeding puck. Tennis balls and lacrosse balls are awesome too. “Reaction balls”, which are balls made with bumps on them so that they bounce unpredictably are also a fun option.

There are many different drills you can do. You can throw balls off the ground or off of a wall. You can learn to juggle three balls various ways— in the air, off the wall, or even off the ground. You can shuffle side to side while catching a ball off of a wall, or you can be jumping side to side while catching the ball.

The main thing to focus on when you are doing drills like these is to make sure that you are watching the ball intently all the way from the wall into your hand. This is what will improve your tracking and hand eye coordination. If you are not doing that, you are not getting the full benefit from these drills.

A little trick we like to use to help us focus on tracking is to draw small numbers on the ball in permanent marker. When it bounces off the wall, try to pick up a number on its way into your hand and mentally call it out. That way you know you are tracking the ball intently. It also makes the drill more fun.

Off Ice Workouts

We recommend that you do an off ice workout for at least an hour three times per week to improve your strength and conditioning. If you are sixteen years old or over, and are serious about playing at the next level, then you should be working out five days per week for at least an hour. We are not certified strength and conditioning specialists, so we don’t want to recommend specific workouts. But we do know that resistance training with weights or bands, and explosiveness training, such as various types of jumps, are incredibly beneficial to improving your fitness and your game. If you are looking for free resources, there are tons of videos and articles online from certified strength and conditioning coaches who present specific exercises you can do. (We of course, offer training ourselves through our strength coach, Will Burgess. If you are interested, you can find more here).

You also want to improve your flexibility over the course of the offseason too. Being super flexible is not make or break for goaltending, but, added flexibility doesn’t hurt. We typically work on stretching before and after workouts to retain and improve our flexibility.

Have Goals and Make a Plan

Even though you don’t want your mind completely worn down from thinking about hockey all the time, you still want to make sure you have goals written down for next season, and you keep them top of mind throughout your summer training. They will help you remember why you are working so hard throughout the offseason, and encourage you to push yourself through workouts that you don’t feel like doing.

Also, be sure to have a measurable plan for your offseason training that you can follow.

Here is an example of a bad plan:

Skate every week
Workout every week
Play other sports with my friends.
Work on ball drills every week.
Stretch

None of these are measurable— you don’t know whether you executed your plan or not, because the plan is so vague.

Here is an example of a good plan :

Skate 2 hours every week.
Workout for an hour 3 times per week,
Play other sports for an hour at least once every 2 weeks.
Work on ball drills for 15 minutes 4 times per week.
Stretch for 10 minutes 6 days per week.

You can see how much easier this plan is to measure. Either you made time to workout for an hour 3 times this week, or you didn’t. Either you worked on ball drills for 15 minutes four times this week, or you didn’t.

Because this plan is so specific and measurable, you know for certain whether you executed your plan or you didn’t. If you did, great. If not, then you know you need to make adjustments so that you execute your plan in the future.

Make sure that your plan isn’t so tough on you that you become sick of hockey. Remember, you want to maintain the balance between improvement and feeling worn down. You want to feel excited to practice and play again once the new season rolls around.

If you keep your goals top of mind and execute your plan, you will set yourself up to have a great offseason, and an outstanding season ahead.

Austin Lotz https://moderngoaltending.com