wags

Hey OR, I'm more of a lurker so I hope you don't mind me throwing my two cents in with things I've learned over the years. I also started goaltending as an adult so it's been cool to watch your videos. You're doing good with your feet the proper width apart standing, keep that up. I'm noticing you're still have trouble with your ankles clicking back together and your butt dropping when you're butterflying. I know it's been brought up before so I won't dwell on it too much, but a couple of things that pop in my head are stance and core strength. It's hard to tell fully evaluate a stance from only a rear view, but it looks to me you might not have a deep enough knee bend. You're kind of falling into your butterfly, shown by there being a lot of drop in your body height. Ideally your upperbody and hands should be in more or less the same height as you started when you go down. You really want to drive into your butterfly, not drop into it. Driving will help pinch your knees together and keep your ankles apart, it'll close things faster, and it'll help keep your butt up. The only way you can drive is if your knees are bent and loaded up to drive down. Like wise I'm don't know how much core and leg stuff you're doing outside of hockey but it's an absolutely essential thing to be working on in order to play goal. Sitting in a proper stance is a lot like doing wall sits through out a game. And to sit tall and properly in the butterfly you need a good core. I think it was Maria Mountain who wrote in regards to adult rec goalies that "you don't play goal to get into shape, you have to be in shape to play goal." I think that's very true. Goaltending is such a unique blend of endurance and explosiveness compared to skating out that I think it's really hard to efficiently increase your fitness level by solely playing the position. I'm liking your catch glove position. It looks like it's in front of you and active. That is really important. A lot of newer goalies tend to lock their arms into their bodies and while that may close a hole, it also makes any save with your arms that much harder to do as well as much harder to direct rebounds. Keeping your hands in front means you can watch the puck the whole way into your catcher or off of your blocker instead relying only on "feel". Try to really think about which leg you are getting up on. I notice every time you get up, you get up with your left leg first. The proper way to do it is to be getting up on the leg on the opposite side of where the puck has gone so you can use that leg to push towards the play. Like if you make a save and the puck goes off to your left, you want to bring your right leg up and vice versa. There are a lot of times in your video where you make the save, the pucks goes to the left, you get up on your left leg first and you have to do a big awkward turn to get back to the play. If you get up with your right leg in those situations you go in a smoother, straighter and shorter line back into the play. This might be something that just needs some conscious practice or it might need some strength training for a less dominant leg. Don't ever stop fighting. I'm liking that you don't give up on plays. It's easy to get into a drop and block mentality and if you read the play wrong or the rebound goes wonky to just kind of sit there. You keep fighting to make a save which is awesome. The last thing I wanted to bring up is mindset and mentality. I've noticed through the thread there is a lot of emphasis placed on being scored on and the narrative that comes with it. I'm going to tell you probably the single most important thing for you to be able to improve. Stop worrying about the goals. Stop counting the goals. Stop apologizing for them. Stop worrying about what your defense does or does not do. The score, the goals, what the skaters are doing are all meaningless for your improvement. The only thing that you control is what you are doing I'm assuming you are doing this because you love playing goal. You enjoy it and want to get better. But I can't imagine it's really enjoyable to beat yourself up over getting scored on. Let's be real here. You're a newer goalie and that shinny is just that, it's shinny. It's not pro or anything like that. You know you're learning. This isn't your livelihood, you aren't getting paid to perform, you aren't playing for the Stanley cup. These games and goals only mean as much as what you make them. You can make them into constructive positives or deflating negatives. You can see it in your game, you definitely seemed off once you got in your head and frustrated in the latest video. Focus is so important and once you lose it is when those "bad goals" happen. These goals do not matter one lick. Forget about them. There is a lot of research to suggest that a process focus is better than a result focus for learning and improvement. Indeed many of the most successful athletes and teams tend to be process oriented. They focus on what they do and how they play, not what the score is. You could turn around backwards and face the net and you would probably end up making a couple of saves based on chance. Does that that mean you were playing well on those saves? Of course not, but having a results orientation tells us that. On the flip side say you are playing a two on one, you take the shooter, maintain square to the puck with proper depth but you're just not physically quick enough to get across to stop the one timer. Does that make you a bad goalie? Does that change how you should play a two on one? Again, of course not. It's a high percentage play that you know you played properly, you just have physical limitations, which everybody has. If you can make that save awesome, if not you know you played it properly the best you can and getting scored on doesn't detract from that. What this means for you is to really think about how you mentally process goals and your play. If you get scored on don't beat yourself up. Don't look for an excuse. Don't mope. Quickly and dispassionately evaluate the shot, evaluate how you played it and think about what you can do for next time. Then move on to the next shot. You can't stop goals that have already gone in so worrying about that is wasted energy. Stop counting goals and start counting saves. You'll be amazed what that will do for your confidence. You say you "barely made any saves". I counted at least 23 saves and I didn't count through the whole video. You saved more than went in. Try to stop using language like "I played bad" or "I can't do this right" and use non judgement, constructive language like "If I move out a few inches I'll have a better angle on the shot that went in." Again, goaltending is so mental, the minute you get into a self defeatist mindset your play is going to suffer. And if a defenceman gets pissy and throws their stick again, laugh in your head and move on, it's rec shinny, it's silly to get upset and throw yourself off over that. :) Good luck, I hope this helps and keep throwing out the kicks!