Long time reader of this thread, first time poster...
I recently picked up all the gear to play goal and have skated out twice now... The first time I played for my regular team which allowed our normal goalie to skate out, and the team we played was one at the bottom of the standings. I think I faced 10 total shots and gave up 3 goals (though 1 was not a goal, the ref just saw my d-man pull it out from under my pad with his glove and figured he was trying to get it out before anyone noticed...). But overall I did not look that great and could not get my pads to rotate into the butterfly. After going back over some things in this thread and some others on this site, I loosened up a couple of straps and tried again two nights later at a drop-in:
The things I've noticed straight away that need work:
- I tend to drop to my right knee instead of both, which pulls my head to the right and opens up a ton of space on my glove side (and also pulls my glove away from the shot)
- When I drop, I drop my hands at the same time instead of keeping them high
- Don't have any real strategy when pushing up against the posts, and desperately need to work on my butterfly slides so i can go post to post
- not coming out of the net far enough to challenge shooters
- too much waist bend, not enough knee bend
I'm a little over 6'5" 195ish so I should be able to eat up a ton of net if I keep up my posture when I drop.
The gear I have is:
bauer supreme one.7 skates
bauer vapor x55 pads 36" +0
vaughn kneepads
vaughn v3 7500 blocker/glove combo
CCM Premier C/A
Bauer Reactor 7000 pants
Bauer NME7 Helmet w/ vaughn dangler
Montreal Nitro Lite 27" stick (regular hand)
Let me know what else you guys see that I need to work on!
Thanks,
Pat