WHY THE GOALIE COACH MUST HAVE THE LEAD IN THE GOALIE CHOICE

A sentence that is often used by head coaches when talking about who to play in goal, especially when the goalie coach has a different view from theirs, is that in the end they are the head coaches, and they are the ones who decide.

This can work in a professional league where the goalie is a complete and experienced athlete, so where the only plausible and agreeable reality for an athlete is to deliver quality performance. It is necessary, however, to point out that increasingly at such levels, the decision and analysis of such a sensitive position as goalie is no longer the prerogative of the head-coach, but special boards have been created that deal with both development and the analysis and decision of who will be the starter. This is, clearly, in a two-way exchange with the coaching staff and the head coach.

When it comes to youth goalies and the junior sector, with all the categories in a European club structure, so starting from hockey school and going up to the u20 category, performance, while important, is and should be linked to the development and training of the athlete.

When you talk about an athlete you go into countless sides : technical, tactical, motivational, mental, physical,... In a goalkeeper, the coordinative difficulty both at the level of eye-hand coordination and at the level of strategic coordination with respect to the information gathered, as well as marked intramuscular coordination, lead the role to have a rather late development compared to that of movement players, who have an overall less complex task.

Performance in its narrowest sense should in no way be taken into account in the U9, U11 and U13 categories, where the choice of goalkeepers should be made simply on the basis of the technical level at which the goalkeeper can have his or her greatest development. Thus, it is not the possibility of victory per se that should indicate the athlete to be put on ice, but rather the overall technical level of the competition, which duly chosen will lead the goalkeeper to measure himself at a level of both intensity and technics consonant with his range of potential development.

For example, many overseas goalkeeping experts has begun to question the belief that goalkeeper size is a preponderant factor in a goalkeeper's ability to have a more or less good career. In several analyses carried out on this issue, it has been noted that a major determinant of the competitive advantage of large goalkeepers lies in the fact that they have performance axed coaches at the level of the U13 and U15 categories who prefer large boys in goal, because at these ages for strength, speed, and accuracy in the game, a large goalkeeper certainly has a significant advantage. This particular one, i.e., not having goalie coaches in the pure development sector, leads to too much early selection that disadvantages goalkeepers with perhaps more talent but smaller size. This lack of patience and this rush for victory (In developing athletes what does victory mean? Winning or developing players who have what it takes to make it to pro?) lead to curbing smaller goalies and favoring big goalies, hence also a greater presence of big goalies in the higher categories.

Each category has its own training peculiarities.

In U11 we look for mobility and basic field hockey sense, linked to learning basic techniques.

In U13 you want to refine those techniques, strengthen the physique and add complex techniques at the early stage, as well as the first notions of stick play and the first notions of complex rules of play (here you start playing full court).

In order to have learning that remains fixed in the athlete's head, such basic techniques and strategies must have a success rate that is regular and greater than the failure rate. For this reason, it is not important to win or not to take goals, but it becomes vital to be able to play at such a level that one is always on the outer edge of one's comfort zone and can test and improve one's skills with a success/failure balance that allows one to anchor successes on a regular basis and to learn various techniques and situations in a positive way.

When entering categories that have the designation performance as their hat, it is necessary to remember that we are not talking about finished players, but about players who are evolving physically, mentally, and technically. In these categories a little more emphasis will be placed on results, although they do not have to be the top priority.

It is important to understand that the North American mentality, and the structure of the leagues and sports clubs associated with it, are profoundly different than the structure of a European club. In America there is no structure, but individual categories that take 22 players each year to make a top league. There is no patience or player building, only winning in the immediate term. In Europe, clubs have a developed training structure and take on athletes at a young age with the intent of helping them through category by category.

Based on this notable difference, it can be inferred that a club with such a developed structure, should be more concerned about developing players up to the pro level. Such concern should also include in the sports strategies the possibility of pushing the fitness of a goalie, not forgetting that the period of play and practice between the ages of 15 and 20, will go a long way in developing game experiences, cataloging such situations, and creating a neuronal structure of recognizing them that can enhance and speed up their hockey sense and decision making, eventually developing them into pro goalies.

Targeting, simply, one goalie, without giving others a chance to play is a strategy that can be considered detrimental to the athlete's mental and strategic development, as well as considerably reducing the possibility of choice for continuation to the pro category.

Unfortunately, too often, the role of the coach is understood as a selection role, when, instead, the right question should not be "Can he play?" but "How can I make him a player/goalie I can field?"

At the same time, the social role of sports is to educate the boy in a sense of belonging, which is developed not in showing condescension and making everyone play equally, but by showing that in the highlights of the season the choice falls among members who have contributed to success, and not with outside adds (be they players coming from outside or overage within the club). This is a critical point in creating attachment to the club, as well as a sense of sports justice according to which opportunity to play and suffer is given to those who have suffered, made sacrifices, and struggled for the entire duration of the season. A sense of belonging and teamwork that will develop into attachment to the club in the extra-sporting future, as well as a sense of justice shared by team members and subrecipient members from season to season, which will lead the team to accept sacrifice and decisions of the coaches, with a greater sense of confidence, thus with better motivation and more to contribution.

Last but not least, the actual performance of the goalkeeper is often misjudged by the head-coach, who, not having the technical basis for evaluating the goalkeeper, tends to fossilize his assessment on hints that are not necessarily real but simply serve to support his own thesis, which is a thesis based on the memory of a few episodes experienced from the gut and, often, evaluated in their singularities and not in the overall whole of the game. There is evidence that a coach, at best, remembers 30 percent of the episodes of the match and that this percentage always includes the part with 100 percent of the errors.

What is not evaluated in the performance by head coaches, is the moment when an episode happens as well as the proper technical benchmark for each age, and this are the most important part in evaluating a goalkeeper.

This lack of objectivity, as well as knowledge of the person and the goalie, leads the coach to evaluate the goalie on a partial recollection, without real knowledge of the role.

The role of all coaches is to find ways for goalies to improve, not to drown them with partial evaluations that do not take into account what a game was, not out of arrogance, but out of lack of knowledge about the role.

For these reasons, in addition to the intrinsic knowledge of the goalkeeper, as well as the fact that the goal is the development of the goalkeeper for his future at the senior level and thus an investment that brings his return on the economic side as well.

The only one capable of doing this, finding a balance between performance and training, is the goalie coach who too often is singled out for that role only to the extent that in his opinion it collides with that of the head coach.

Too often, with regard to that role, a coach stops at appearances without considering the full complexity of the job and the situation and forgetting that in a role whose development, because of complexity, remains late, it is necessary to have a balance between performance and development.

Coaches have already, in the past, crippled the category to go and win when it was not the main point, effectively cutting an entire category of goalkeepers just because they were not bringing immediate success.

For these reasons, the growth and development of a goalie must be followed by the goalie coach, who is prepared for it and not by coaches with no idea of what is the mental side, the technical difficulty, and the state of physical/mental development of goalies. Immediate success isn’t the key through we will get future successes, but only a step that can capitalize on previous good job done or that can ruin a whole project if not assessed in the right way.

We rely on expert finance, law, health, construction, … why we don’t rely on expert for a complex role like goalies and a very complex field as goalie development is?

written by: Paolo Della Bella (Head of Goalie development of HC Lugano & U18 Swiss National Team Goalie Coach)