Ever watch your child’s team practice and think to yourself how they aren’t geared towards your son/daughter? The good news is regardless of how geared the practices are for your child, they can still benefit greatly from them. We’ve come up with a list of 25 practice habits and a bunch of drill specific areas your children can focus on. We will start with 5 practice habits every other week.

11) PUCK TRACKING

 Even the youngest of goaltenders know the importance of puck tracking (ie-watching the puck) but like most skills, there’s a lot more to it. There’s the basics of puck tracking, keep your eyes on the puck, head should turn, as an ok explanation is to have the goalies nose point to the puck but there’s much more to it.

 There are stance components; weight should be on the balls of your feet, gloves and legs are ready, head tilts downwards so that your nose and chin point directly to the puck as the shots are being released, shoulders are rolled forward.

Post Save keeping your eyes on the puck, or finding the puck when it takes a bad bounce, not to mention moving on pucks that miss the net. Yes this is included in tracking skills.

 If you're a young goalie, staying patient on high shots, we all know young players when they do their big drag release they’re trying to shoot high. Advance tracking skills, involving knowing where the shots are going, without giving all the trade secrets away, we’d strongly recommend your child tries “guessing” where the shots are going and notice release patterns. 

We can see here, one fundamental skill that can literally be practiced all practice. This one skill has so many components to it (there are more) that it alone should be focused on every practice. 

On to our next point, I promise there won’t be very many technical skills as those will be included in another article, but tracking is so crucial it had to be mentioned here.

12)  PUCK HANDLING

Handling the puck is another important skill in today’s game. It’s one of those skills that aren’t practiced enough by today’s goaltender at a young age but all of a sudden they are expected to play rims and help with breakouts as they get older. The solution (on top of working on your shot and stick handling at home) is to do it during practice. There are so many opportunities to improve your puck handling skills it’s a wonder no one does.

Never go in nets during the 3-5 minute at the beginning of practice when players are wiring pucks left right and center, not only is it dangerous, it really has no value, you’ll see enough ridiculous shots during practice. Instead, take a puck, practice your stick handling and shot, work your backhand, forehand, hard passes on the ice, saucer passes, two hand stick handling etc.. So many things you can do and should do.

 On a side note, normally goalie sticks are made too tall. Sorry parents, you'll probably have to cut a couple of inches off the top of those 300$ sticks.

Even if your team doesn’t practice rims, you can look for opportunities to go out and play the puck. Every time you freeze a puck you can get up and pass it back in line, down time in drills you can stick handle and shoot, when players miss the pass you can go out and deke him, during game situation drills you can make a play at loose pucks (it’s practice who cares if you mess up!). 

Another side note, older goalies need to talk to their coaches about a communication system with their teammates to help with dump-ins and breakouts. Make sure if you’re new to playing the puck that there’s an understanding that you might mess up and cost the odd goal in a game but won’t do it during big games unless you're sure.

Be proactive, as your assistant coaches occasionally during boring drills if they can dump pucks on you, practice rims, dump ins to the side of the net, bouncing pucks maybe even have them forecheck you sometimes. As you can see, the options are limitless.

13) VISUALIZE

Every pro athlete visualizes, be it as “simple” as “dreaming” to become a pro athlete, as purposeful as how Patrick Roy used it to change how he would react to goals going in or as common as you see goalies in warmups stopping “imaginary” shots.

Visualization can be used for many reasons, to help learn more rapidly and implement new movements or save selections, changing one's demeanor or to help turn fiction into a reality. Now as with anything it takes practice and repetition as there’s better ways to visualize then others.

For the sake of keeping this article semi-reasonable in length, I won't go into all the details here as it really is an article on its own. I will say, the more specific and precise you are with your visualizations, the better the results. 

To start, I’d recommend applying the visualizations before flow drills where you know the shots are coming in from further. Start by focusing on rebound control to different locations. Without getting into it too much, be sure to see shots going to different areas, how you want to make the save, how the save feels and the sound the puck makes. I would suggest starting with an easier location like your chest or possibly glove saves.

Eventually you can and should do this at the start of every drill ( and even throughout the drill), seeing different techniques or a mindset you want to apply. It takes some getting used to but the benefits should be noticed almost immediately. 

Don’t stress about visualizing the right way for now, keep the visualizations short to start 10-20 seconds is ample. The only thing I will add is while visualizing, if you happen to let the goal in, do not simply repeat the visualization right away, instead get up from the goal and practice how you want to react after having let a goal in. Ok, i won’t go too far into this, good luck!

14) PRACTICE LEARNING HOW TO LEARN

Learning how to learn, funny statement isn’t it? We’ve had the fortune of coaching a few NHL goalies on top of numerous Junior Major and NCAA D1 goalies and one of the main things they have in common is their ability to learn and learn quickly. Now as with anything, it takes time and practice to learn well.

First off is understanding, kids in general have a shyness to not know right away, to ask for clarifications and simply saying they don’t understand. One of the best things you can help your child with (as should your coaches) is to ask questions, ask for another explanation. On top of this I’d recommend encouraging them to tell the coaches which way they learn best, ie- Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic (need to do it). Without a doubt this will help speed up the learning curve.

Next up is the dreaded F word, FOCUS. Simply put, focus is the ability to concentrate on a given task for a certain amount of time. This alone is a challenge for a lot of individuals, obviously at a younger age it’s even more challenging, but that’s ok, that’s why it’s being practiced. 

As far as focus goes, we like to refer to the same system that’s used in the NHL with their starters and backups. The Marty Brodeur era of playing 70+ games is long gone, it’s now called 1A 1B where the backups are expected to play 25+ games. When I say 1A this would refer to the task we're asking the goalie to concentrate on and 1B is stopping the puck. We generally don’t believe in only focusing on the task at hand (sometimes for muscle memory we will) as it creates goalie robots.

Self-Compassion, we often tend to expect we should master skills right away, which inevitably leads to frustration. At a young age, the reality is that it will probably take a good 10-20 reps before it’s executed properly once, nevermind the “10,000 reps” rule of thumb. Add to this while we're concentrating/thinking it’s harder to make saves; it’s a perfect storm to get frustrated. Hence the importance of becoming aware of how much time, focus and patience it takes to master a skill. I’m not saying not to have high expectations of yourself, but being realistic helps those expectations come true quicker.

The good news is, if you’ve focused on learning how to learn, as you get older it gets “easier” to learn more efficiently. Outside of understanding the above skills, as you get older you can journal your practices, video and re-watch them, visualize between reps, you should have a better understanding of your body as well. 

In an ideal world by the time you’ve hit 15 years of age you can learn “instantly”, ok it isn’t instant, but you know how you learn best, you know how to ask the questions best needed to understand what’s expected of you, you understand how to “feel” you body and still stay focused on the play and you have trained yourself to put in the extra work to speed up the process.

15) BORING DRILLS ARE GREAT PRACTICE

We’ve all heard the saying how you practice is how you play, while at a young age I don’t necessarily agree, long term I believe it to be true. All this to say, when we zone out during boring drills, what do you think is going to happen in games when you don’t face many shots?

Every team has drills that barely involve the goalie, it’s normal, it’s a team game and well there’s more players then there are goalies. While I hope this doesn’t happen all practice, I do believe that if it’s happening one drill a practice, it’s ok and actually beneficial for a goalie if they look at it the right way.

An easy thing to do during this time would be to do your own work (footwork, play the puck etc..) or have an assistant coach or a spare player help you on aspects of your game (tracking, rims, different situations etc…). I’m not such a fan of this. While it’s better then nothing, you want to be ready for sequences in a game when you don’t see action for 5,10,20 mins at a time then all of a sudden are called upon. These drills are a perfect time to practice that focus.

A better, albeit less enjoyable, option is to simply watch your teammates at the other end of the ice and try to stay focused on them, not drift off into la la land. Now, I know how tough this is, but doing this helps you with your focus and staying present. Try and be interested in what they’re doing, check out the moves their pulling, watch the patterns they have or how the release shots, see if you can tell what they’re about to do, at the very least have a moment where you zone back in as the play is approaching the blue line (their blue line).

If the play only stays in the other zone, I'd go so far as to ask an assistant coach to randomly come in on you on a breakaway every 3-5mins to test if you can focus while being cold. While the plays at the other end do some breath work, or even during pauses in action some crease movements to help you stay sharp. 

Different things work for different people, the key is to take advantage of this time also to improve yourself.