All About Goalies!
Bill Pilat, Roanoke
OK, so your humble correspondent is not the sharpest tool in the shed. I have enjoyed doing podcasts and articles with Coach Bill Pilat back in 2009 and 2012. I loved those sessions and I guess you did too, based on the reaction to the 2V1 Behind to 4V3 article from the last podcast. Anyway, so I had the Premier Goalie Camp guy since…well forever… on the air and never really talked or focused on goalies. So now we changed all that. We spent an hour on the podcast talking about coaching goalies and philosophies and I learned a ton. And thus this article.
Maybe you have an awesome goalie coach, who played goalie and really knows how to communicate and teach goalies. Or… Maybe like me you are not sure how to coach goalies so you just do not do it as much as you should.
The dialog with coach was fascinating and a lot more philosophical in nature than I expected. Although there are a handful of cool drills in this article I found his philosophies the most interesting. If you are an inexperienced coach you will learn a lot, if you are experienced coach, perhaps you might think some of this is basic, but I can tell you after 35 years of coaching this article really made me think. In no particular order here is what I learned from Coach Pilat.
Having a goalie coach is an awesome advantage so I guess that comes first. Next I was a little surprised at his next comment. “We spend a lot of time talking to our goalies about what they think that they themselves need to work on.” Now there is a thought eh? The point being your goalie knows if he needs work off hip, or high bouncers, or ‘low-to-low”… so ask and then spend time on that specific area.
Goalie Warm Up
In this area coach might be still considered a little old school, but I have sent all my goalies to his camps and I have seen the dramatic results. Coach places an extremely high emphasis on the accuracy of the person or player warming up the goalie. If your shooting is not what it once was as a player, then delegate this with the following guidelines. Speed and accuracy are two different areas, and in this case a coach re-living his past cranking the ball to the parking lot, well, it is not the best choice. And coach suggests the best player to warm up a goalie may not be you starters, if there is a more accurate shooter somewhere on the roster.
Basic Warm Up
Arc Position Shots – the detail here might surprise you…