Incorporating Your Goalies into Team Practice

and Tom Klein,
Benilde-St. Margaret's School (MN) Assistant Coach/Goalies

Goaltending is arguably the most important deciding factor in games and championships, yet coaches often overlook it at practice. Most head coaches are not goalies themselves and don't understand how to teach the position. Many coaches focus more energy on their forwards and defensemen and simply throw their goalies into drills without much instruction.

Ken Pauly and assistant coach Tom Klein offer a simple and effective set of tools that will yield big dividends over the course of a season. You'll see excellent goalie-specific drills that can be incorporated into any practice. You'll also get guidelines on how to inspire your goalies to improve during games and to compete more effectively.

6 Goalie Priorities

Coaches Pauly and Klein outline a series of drills for mastering six specific goalie movement priorities and puck stopping techniques. These priorities include

• moving into the angle
• shutting down the short side
• shutting down the 5-hole
• smothering the puck
• controlling the rebound
• staying on your feet when passes cross your face

In practice, Pauly and Klein constantly work on keeping their goalies on their feet when passes go across their face. Often times, goalies drop down on the pass and are not square to the puck on the shot - leaving the top corners and the five hole open. Get a drill that simulates an attack from two different angles that will train your goalies to stay on their feet and in good position to stop the shot. You can break the habit of making one "style" the primary save option - "a pass never beats you, but a shot does."

Practice Drills

Many times goalies are simply thrown into drills and bombarded with shots, which doesn't help them properly work on their skills. Coaches Pauly and Klein explain how to utilize the space you have no matter how big or small in order to give goaltenders the chance to develop the "specific skills" unique to modern goaltending.

The coaches outline a warm-up for the goalie, utilizing the space in the neutral zone to work on movement and tracking the puck, point shot drills, incorporating the second goalie into drills, 5-on-2 drills and the impact hockey ultimate tip in drill.

You'll not only learn practice drills, but equally important practice theory so you can hear how to maintain practice flow, capture the attention of all players on the ice, and create exciting game scenarios for your team.

Game Night

In this segment, Coach Pauly shows you how to challenge your goalies to play their best. This entails stopping all the shots you should, stopping most of the hard ones, and stealing one or two once in a while. He challenges his goalies to play well even when the rest of the team isn't.

Your team's success or failure is dependent on the play of your goaltenders. If a team has solid goaltending, they're more likely to have a higher winning percentage. Coach Pauly sets forth a simple, specific plan to spend more time developing goalies during practice.

48 minutes. 2015.