Conscious Goaltending

The first drill of the Coaching Goalies Drill Series is the two slide drill.

The two slide drill is a bit of a swiss army knife drill for working on slides.

As a base it can help develop the goalie's sliding technique if the coach focuses on ensuring perfect technique on each slide.

If you want to emphasize intensity, quickness and power on their recoveries and slides, you can push the pace on the second slide, forcing the goalie to get to their spots more quickly.

You can also focus on an underrated part of the position, in the goalie's routes around the crease and being efficient in how they close space. We prefer our goalies to slide just past the post to fill the top corner quickly with their upper body rather than into the post, which, while it may make it easier to recover on a rebound, can lead to a delay in getting the upper body into the top shelf.

You can run this drill with a lot of differnet tweaks as well, including having the goalie start in RVH, or start by going post to post before the shot. Or, start with the angled shot first.

Generally, we always want the goalie switching directions on the second shot. As if you go left post to middle then right dot angle, the goalie can use momentum from the first save to make the second save and you aren't really working on recoveries anymore.

A lot of goalies are very risk averse when it comes to reaching for pucks in tight, preferring to stay compact on slides. While eliminating holes when you're in position is great, you also need to know when you need to reach to fill space when you're not there yet. The before and after here show how you can make more saves when you're comfortable reaching to get to your spots. Once you're in position, you can worry about being compact and eliminating holes.

Macklin Celebrini is such a good hockey player! He does so many little things so well. Here’s a small detail from the olympics that you can use to help score more goals!