Control Goaltending: Body Control
I really enjoyed my Old Dog session from the previous weekend. The early evening session was the Old Dogs clinic where we worked on several aspects of backside edge (butterfly shuffles), block walks and momentum reverses with the backside edge. What made this session interesting was watching the older guys who are physically mature and in decent physical shape tackle a new (and difficult) physical skill. The Old Dogs fought against muscle memory and years of old experience to learn the intricacies of the down game. We have worked together on these skills over the last few sessions and real improvement is being made as an exceptional rate, happily. Of course, some major strides are still needed to bring the execution of the technique to a smooth polish. In the meantime, it has been a study in body control.
As the Old Dogs are adult, it is very easy to explain a drill to them and to break down the technical details. While the technical details are demonstrated, each physical move is explained, it is very easy to confirm that the goalies understand what is needed to perform the skill. Compared to younger goalies who may not have so much body awareness, adult goalies are more in tuned with their bodies. They quite often recognize when they have made a technical mistake when executing a skill. However, this recognition and understanding what and how to do a new physical skill is a long way away from performing the skill, as we all know. One of the major side-effects of a learning a new physical skill other than a lack of speed or power is the lack of body control. While adult goalies generally have a good strength to weight ratio and are able push or lift in a general kinetic fashion with strength, they often have difficulty in translating that strength into a powerful, balanced and controlled performance of that technique. As a goalie coach, this lack of body control is very easy to observe in most cases and it can manifest itself several ways:
- Blade or edge slippage
- Abbreviated or weak pushes
- Spinouts or poor rotation that prevent squareness
- Movement of hands
- Lack of stick discipline
- Inability to rotate head or upper torso independently of the rest of the body
- Loss of balance (lip stands or falling back on butt)
During our Old Dogs sessions, I see examples of goalies fighting against their bodies’ natural inclinations when performing the very unnatural movements required for modern goaltending. Unfortunately, there is no short-cut in correcting the above symptoms of weak body control for a goalie, except through correct instruction, repetition, feedback/observation and then more repetition. In a sense, I’m conducting an experiment with the Old Dogs as much (willing?) test subjects.
The question is can muscle memory and old habits/natural instincts be trained away over a very short period of time to develop a skill set that will allow a mature goalie to use the new tools naturally and efficiently? Time will tell…
For the development of younger goalies, goalie coaches are expected to help instruct the most efficient way for a goalie to perform a movement, save-selection, recovery or other physical applications. The major advantage for youth goalies is time: they have lot's of it and they usually have extra practice time to work on the skills. The weakness for them is often the younger the athlete, the less body awareness they might have. They may feel they are performing the drill or excecuting the movement with control, but are they're not and they're not aware of the mistake even upon (re-)instruction. Video or mirrors are a great tool in this situation, as is a peer or demo-goalie to execute the skills for the kids. Kids are natural mimickers (it is how almost all of human experience was passed down prior to the written language). Plenty of opportunity must be made available to them to mimick and follow examples of the desired form.